Rockwell C. Smith - "A New Kind of Life" (July 14, 1974)
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
- | But now are ye light in the Lord. | 0:04 |
Walk as children of light. | 0:10 | |
I never consider that text, | 0:18 | |
but that I remember the quaint description | 0:22 | |
a little girl gave of a Christian. | 0:27 | |
She said a Christian is someone | 0:32 | |
who when he comes into a room makes all the others feel | 0:37 | |
that somebody turned on all the lights. | 0:44 | |
We are all children of light. | 0:51 | |
We are people of privilege, educational, | 0:56 | |
political, cultural, social, | 1:03 | |
national, economic privilege. | 1:09 | |
Our task as Christians | 1:15 | |
is to discover the modern contemporary meaning, | 1:19 | |
which may properly be associated with this admonition | 1:26 | |
from the great apostle spoken now so very long ago. | 1:31 | |
What does it mean to walk as children of light? | 1:39 | |
Perhaps one approach to an answer is to search together | 1:48 | |
for the functions of light as we know them. | 1:55 | |
Fundamentally, I suppose there would be no question | 2:02 | |
that the function of light is to dispel darkness. | 2:09 | |
There is so much darkness abroad in our world this morning. | 2:17 | |
The earth dwells in an eerie twilight | 2:26 | |
of moral and ethical uncertainty. | 2:31 | |
I do not refer to the absence of knowledge, | 2:35 | |
but rather to the presence of knowledge | 2:40 | |
uncontrolled by character. | 2:43 | |
In a free society, | 2:49 | |
the ideal of freedom is dependent | 2:51 | |
for the safety of its practice | 2:55 | |
upon the element of moral goodness. | 2:58 | |
No one dares give an irresponsible person liberty. | 3:04 | |
But the accumulation of facts alone may make a man clever | 3:15 | |
without making him good. | 3:19 | |
The foundation of a free society is not the clever man, | 3:23 | |
but the good man. | 3:29 | |
Therefore, it is education plus religion | 3:32 | |
which illuminates life on this planet. | 3:39 | |
That light does not burn brightly this morning. | 3:46 | |
There are various ways of documenting this statement. | 3:53 | |
For example, sociological statisticians tell us | 3:57 | |
that for the last year when accurate records are available, | 4:03 | |
there are at least 13 million boys and girls | 4:12 | |
and young men and young women in these United States | 4:19 | |
who were not at that time identified | 4:24 | |
with any religious educational program. | 4:29 | |
Furthermore, for the same year, | 4:35 | |
the 1 million and more of you | 4:38 | |
who encountered initial difficulty with the law | 4:43 | |
upon analysis were not the great majority of them identified | 4:48 | |
in any way with formal religious instruction | 4:58 | |
nor were their parents. | 5:04 | |
All of this in a nation | 5:08 | |
that still spends more on the horse betting | 5:10 | |
and on liquor than it does on all religious | 5:14 | |
and philanthropic enterprises put together. | 5:20 | |
But there are other ways of documenting this same statement. | 5:25 | |
The light does not yet burn brightly. | 5:30 | |
I was seated some months ago in the city of Minneapolis | 5:35 | |
with a prominent layman of my own church. | 5:40 | |
A man distinguished in his own professional career | 5:45 | |
who had been given almost every responsibility | 5:50 | |
that can be trusted to a layman in our denomination. | 5:54 | |
We were eating dinner together | 6:01 | |
and in the course of the meal, | 6:03 | |
he laid down his knife and his fork | 6:05 | |
and spoke a single sentence to me. | 6:07 | |
"I find it impossible," said he, | 6:11 | |
"to believe in a personal God | 6:15 | |
or in the existence of a life beyond this life." | 6:19 | |
I listened and in that single dinner time sentence | 6:28 | |
there flashed before my mind the whole shocking pageantry | 6:36 | |
of the modern world | 6:44 | |
and indeed the modern church's doctrinal illiteracy. | 6:47 | |
I remember the words of Dean Hough. | 6:57 | |
Our civilization is falling apart | 7:02 | |
for want of a sufficient number of great believers. | 7:06 | |
In the words of James Stewart of Scotland, | 7:12 | |
Christianity is often equated | 7:16 | |
with a pious ethical behavior | 7:20 | |
and a kind of mild humanitarian benevolence | 7:26 | |
set in a context of big theistic belief. | 7:38 | |
The success of the Christian enterprise dear friends | 7:48 | |
is not dependent in the final analysis | 7:53 | |
upon ecclesiastical machinery or upon liturgical duty. | 7:58 | |
It is dependent rather upon the bigger | 8:08 | |
of a set of great convictions about God and about Christ, | 8:14 | |
about human sin and divine redemption, | 8:24 | |
about judgment and about the kingdom of God, | 8:30 | |
about prayer and about life everlasting. | 8:35 | |
The whole fore flung program of the Christian Church | 8:45 | |
will rest at last upon shifting sands | 8:54 | |
if these convictions do not persist. | 9:01 | |
The light does not yet burn brightly | 9:10 | |
and if we are to walk as children of light, | 9:16 | |
we must dispel this darkness. | 9:20 | |
Again, there is a simple function of light | 9:28 | |
about which every housewife knows. | 9:31 | |
Light reveals shabby nooks and crevices. | 9:36 | |
And so the light of Christ in the world | 9:42 | |
reveals shabby nooks and crevices in human society. | 9:46 | |
For example, prejudice. | 9:52 | |
How much prejudice there is today. | 9:57 | |
National, racial, religious, social prejudice. | 10:01 | |
And every one of us is constructed in such a fashion | 10:08 | |
that he holds on with greater tenacity to his prejudice | 10:12 | |
than he does do his conviction. | 10:20 | |
And yet we know as Christians | 10:25 | |
that our prejudices must undergo the scrutiny | 10:28 | |
of the will of Jesus Christ | 10:34 | |
and some of them in the process must be abandoned. | 10:39 | |
Macaulay in his essay on Sir James Macintosh | 10:47 | |
has a passage in which he defends the right | 10:51 | |
of a man to change his mind. | 10:55 | |
He says the individual who believed the same thing | 10:58 | |
about the French revolution in 1789, in 1794, | 11:01 | |
in 1804, in 1814 and in 1834 | 11:07 | |
had to be either a divinely ordained prophet | 11:15 | |
or an obstinate boo. | 11:19 | |
Some of us need to change our minds. | 11:24 | |
To abandon our prejudices. | 11:28 | |
James Truslow Adams in his book Epic of America | 11:31 | |
introduces an intriguing hypothesis. | 11:36 | |
He suggests that one of the reasons why this young nation | 11:39 | |
so quickly spanned the distance between two oceans | 11:44 | |
was simply the fact that there was constantly a new frontier | 11:49 | |
toward which people could move and when they become weak, | 11:55 | |
when they became weary of struggling with a certain problem, | 12:00 | |
all they had to do, | 12:06 | |
said this author, | 12:09 | |
was to break camp and to move westward | 12:10 | |
and to pitch their tents again in a new place | 12:14 | |
where for at least a little while they were free | 12:18 | |
from the old trouble. | 12:22 | |
Well, if this hypothesis could ever be assumed to be true, | 12:26 | |
it cannot be assumed to be true now, | 12:33 | |
for there are no more geographical frontiers. | 12:36 | |
All of them have been swept off | 12:39 | |
into the waters of the sea and now at last, | 12:41 | |
whether we like it or not, | 12:45 | |
the American people must stand where they are | 12:48 | |
and come to grips with their problems. | 12:53 | |
I sometimes think that if we could summarize the meaning | 12:58 | |
of the message of the prophets of the Old Testament, | 13:03 | |
men like Amos, (indistinct) | 13:07 | |
and all the rest for our modern world, | 13:09 | |
is that somebody could be given in a single word contact. | 13:14 | |
Contact, the whole open bleeding wound of human society | 13:18 | |
must be brought at last into therapeutic contact | 13:25 | |
with the healing love of Almighty God. | 13:30 | |
Prejudice must go. | 13:37 | |
But there is another shabby nook or crevice | 13:41 | |
that the light of Christ reveals affluent. | 13:44 | |
I wonder if we have stopped to think | 13:49 | |
that here in the United States, | 13:51 | |
we have 6% of the inhabitable territory of earth | 13:53 | |
and 7% of the world's population, | 13:59 | |
but we have 37% of the world's goods. | 14:03 | |
Reinhold Niebuhr said that, | 14:10 | |
this nation is a gadget field paradise | 14:12 | |
suspended in a hell of international insecurity. | 14:16 | |
It's difficult this morning | 14:24 | |
for us in the midst of our luxury to realize | 14:25 | |
that there are at least 1,600,000,000s | 14:30 | |
of people on this globe | 14:34 | |
who have never had enough food to eat | 14:38 | |
or enough medicine for their times of illness. | 14:41 | |
The greatest danger inherent in economic prosperity | 14:48 | |
and bounty is the danger | 14:52 | |
of a certain allegedly innocent comfortable faultiness | 14:55 | |
which almost imperceptibly destroys that spiritual awareness | 15:01 | |
in the climate of which true compassion | 15:07 | |
and stamina and the will to sacrifice flourish. | 15:11 | |
Our Puritan fathers had a prayer that they prayed | 15:21 | |
and that we might do well to learn to pray again. | 15:25 | |
God gave us the gift of tears. | 15:29 | |
But the light does another thing. | 15:38 | |
Light shows the way. | 15:43 | |
Jesus Christ said, | 15:47 | |
"I am the way, | 15:49 | |
the truth and the life." | 15:51 | |
And we know of no other philosopher able adequately | 15:56 | |
to reinforce such an assertion. | 16:00 | |
He is the way for individuals | 16:04 | |
because He can take a person who said it himself, | 16:09 | |
I was a zoo of lusts, | 16:12 | |
a bedlam of ambitions, | 16:17 | |
a nursery of fears and a harem of bundled hatred. | 16:20 | |
My name was Legion and make out of him a CS Lewis. | 16:28 | |
He is the way of life for all humankind, | 16:39 | |
because He can take the whole rank fabric | 16:43 | |
of today's society with its problems of materialism | 16:50 | |
of moral relativism, | 16:57 | |
of emotional chaos, | 17:01 | |
of racism, of alcoholism, | 17:05 | |
of pornography, of political chicanery and all the rest. | 17:11 | |
He can take the whole rank fabric of human society | 17:20 | |
and weave it again into a pattern of deep | 17:28 | |
and infinite meaning. | 17:33 | |
This is not our problem. | 17:37 | |
Our problem is that those of us who compose the church | 17:41 | |
have lived in such a way and served in such a manner, | 17:47 | |
that we have not effectively shown to our age | 17:51 | |
that Jesus Christ is the way. | 17:56 | |
The church, even those who love it deeply | 18:02 | |
must acknowledge the church today is the victim | 18:06 | |
of a strange bewilderment and of an immense impotence. | 18:12 | |
We have seen the zeal which so often we have abandoned | 18:28 | |
picked up and put to use by alien causes. | 18:34 | |
Dr Trueblood in a recent sermon | 18:38 | |
told of an afternoon in London, | 18:43 | |
when he left his hotel to walk down to a station | 18:44 | |
to purchase a ticket to go to Scotland the next day. | 18:47 | |
(indistinct) had to pass | 18:51 | |
one of London's great historic churches. | 18:54 | |
There it stood in the gathering twilight | 18:57 | |
with not a soul to see. | 19:02 | |
No light, no door that was open. | 19:05 | |
No sign of life. | 19:12 | |
Dr Trueblood said he looked across the street | 19:16 | |
and there was a vacant lot | 19:19 | |
and in the middle of that lot | 19:20 | |
there stood a little man on a soap box | 19:23 | |
with scores of people gathered around him | 19:27 | |
and this little man was preaching with vigor | 19:31 | |
and with eloquence the doctrines of Karl Marx. | 19:35 | |
And young men and young women were threading their ways | 19:40 | |
in and out among the people | 19:43 | |
distributing complimentary literature. | 19:45 | |
And puzzled, Dr Trueblood walked on. | 19:50 | |
30 minutes later he came back by the church. | 19:53 | |
There it stood. | 19:56 | |
Great edifice dating from Wellington's day still dark, | 19:58 | |
still silent, still deserted. | 20:05 | |
Across the way on that vacant lot, | 20:13 | |
the first little man had finished his piece | 20:16 | |
and another man was standing on the same soap box | 20:19 | |
and more people had gathered around | 20:21 | |
and the message was the same. | 20:23 | |
Boys and girls were passing out free pamphlets. | 20:25 | |
And Dr Trueblood said he went back to his hotel aware | 20:33 | |
that he had seen something significant. | 20:38 | |
Across the span of my own life, | 20:45 | |
communism has done | 20:50 | |
one of the most remarkable evangelistic tasks | 20:53 | |
recorded in the annals of mankind. | 20:56 | |
The year after I was born, | 21:00 | |
every known communist on the face of the earth was in jail. | 21:01 | |
This morning from Berlin to the Bering Straits, | 21:06 | |
from Northern Finland to Indochina, | 21:11 | |
there are nearly 1 billion people | 21:15 | |
under the ruthless way of the hammer and the sickle. | 21:17 | |
The ecclesiastical arithmetic of the annual conference | 21:23 | |
to which I belong in my own denomination | 21:25 | |
reveal that for us last year, | 21:31 | |
it took 300 people 12 months to win a single person | 21:37 | |
to a commitment to Jesus Christ. | 21:43 | |
If we walk as children of light, | 21:50 | |
must we not find means by which to show the way? | 21:55 | |
Last and best of all. | 22:06 | |
The function of light is to bring hope and cheer. | 22:09 | |
The word eschatology means, of course, | 22:19 | |
a doctrine of end things. | 22:22 | |
It is used much by theologians and some by philosophers. | 22:26 | |
There are at least two kinds of eschatology. | 22:34 | |
There is the eschatology of unbelief, | 22:40 | |
HG Wells in the last book that came from his pen | 22:45 | |
Mind at the End of Its Tether, | 22:49 | |
put this graphically. | 22:53 | |
"Man is all played out," he said. | 22:55 | |
"We're living in a jaded world | 22:58 | |
"devoid of recuperative powers. | 23:00 | |
"The darkness is closing in upon the face of humanity. | 23:03 | |
"Our world is like a convoy, lost, | 23:08 | |
"often dark, rocking unknown coast with savages | 23:13 | |
and pirates taking command of the ships." | 23:21 | |
Over against this eschatology of unbelief, | 23:25 | |
there is the simple glorious eschatology of belief. | 23:30 | |
The knowledge of the glory of the Lord | 23:37 | |
shall cover the earth as the water cover the sea. | 23:42 | |
The kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom | 23:51 | |
of our Lord and His Christ. | 23:55 | |
Those of us who are Christians | 24:00 | |
sometimes confuse eschatologies. | 24:04 | |
I had preached in my last church one morning | 24:10 | |
and a little girl from the junior department came up | 24:15 | |
following the sermon and said, | 24:18 | |
"Mr Hunt, were things really as bad | 24:20 | |
as you said they were this morning?" | 24:24 | |
I don't know what I said. | 24:28 | |
I don't know why I said it. | 24:31 | |
Maybe it was something that happened on Saturday night. | 24:34 | |
Maybe it was something I ate for Sunday morning's breakfast. | 24:37 | |
I'm sometimes appalled to contemplate the startling | 24:42 | |
if indefensible relationship that may exist | 24:49 | |
between a preacher's diet and his theology. | 24:53 | |
But I resolved after that little girl | 24:59 | |
said to me what she did that I would never preach again | 25:02 | |
without a note of hope. | 25:04 | |
For we Christians are the only authentically hopeful people | 25:07 | |
on the face of the earth. | 25:12 | |
You remember in the 49th chapter of the Book of Isaiah, | 25:16 | |
the prophet has been pleading with the captive Jews | 25:21 | |
to come back and they have been recalcitrant and difficult. | 25:24 | |
Come back, they have said in effect, | 25:31 | |
come back to what? | 25:34 | |
To devastation? | 25:35 | |
To debris? | 25:37 | |
To ruble, to ashes? | 25:39 | |
Come back to what? | 25:41 | |
And the prophet groping for an answer to their cynicism. | 25:44 | |
Here's God say, | 25:50 | |
my walls are continually before me. | 25:52 | |
God does not see ruins. | 25:59 | |
God does not see devastation. | 26:01 | |
God sees walls. | 26:05 | |
We do not go out to make Jesus Christ king. | 26:12 | |
We go out because the king Himself has sent us. | 26:20 | |
The glorious fact of the Lordship of Christ | 26:26 | |
is the sovereign fruit of our holy faith. | 26:30 | |
Will you letting me risk an oversimplification? | 26:39 | |
I have always had a bad habit in reading novels. | 26:44 | |
I have enjoyed taking a peep at the last page | 26:50 | |
and my wife gently used to chide me for it. | 26:55 | |
For you see, | 27:00 | |
I wanted to be sure that he kissed her. | 27:02 | |
If he didn't kiss her, | 27:07 | |
it wasn't worth reading. | 27:08 | |
I wanted to be sure that the book came out right in the end. | 27:11 | |
Oh, it's a naive philosophy of fiction to hold. | 27:17 | |
And then my more mature years I have abandoned it. | 27:22 | |
But let me say to you | 27:27 | |
that this book comes out right in the end. | 27:28 | |
The writer of the hymn put it in this way, | 27:37 | |
the kingdom is coming, | 27:39 | |
o tell ye the story, | 27:40 | |
God banner exalted shall be, | 27:42 | |
the earth shall be filled with His knowledge and glory, | 27:44 | |
as waters that cover the sea. | 27:47 | |
The world is not to go up in a thermo nuclear holocaust. | 27:54 | |
The world is to see the dreams of God come true. | 28:00 | |
Walk as the apostles as children of light. | 28:10 | |
But how, how do we do it? | 28:14 | |
May I give you the answer in a single sentence? | 28:19 | |
The word that one great preachers spoke about another. | 28:23 | |
The glory of the great example he said, | 28:29 | |
tortured his mind, | 28:33 | |
dominated his conscience and warmed his heart. | 28:36 | |
And so, only when the glory of the great example | 28:42 | |
tortures our minds, | 28:52 | |
dominates our consciences and warms our hearts | 28:55 | |
will we be able to walk as children of light. | 29:02 | |
(machine buzzes) | 29:13 | |
Let us pray. | 29:19 | |
God our father, | 29:23 | |
grant that we may live in such exciting intimacy | 29:26 | |
with the mind and spirit of Christ. | 29:30 | |
That in our own thought and speech and reaction and action, | 29:34 | |
we may be true children of the light. | 29:40 | |
And so, may we help in a way both bold and realistic | 29:45 | |
to illumine our world and our age | 29:51 | |
through Jesus Christ our Lord. | 29:56 | |
And now make grace, | 29:59 | |
mercy and peace from God, the father, | 30:02 | |
from the Lord Jesus Christ, the savior | 30:08 | |
and from the Holy Spirit, the comforter, | 30:12 | |
be our portion for forever and forever. | 30:17 | |
(machine buzzes) | 30:21 | |
♪ Oooo ♪ | 30:24 |