Understanding the Times - Leaders' Talks

You're listening to this week's edition of the Rogue.

When somebody says, well, you know, nobody really knows what is right or what is wrong.

I guarantee you, whenever somebody says that, what's gonna follow is what they believe is right.

What they want is not to convince you there's no such thing as right or wrong.

What they want is for you to put your guard down so they can tell you what is right according to their perspective.

At The Road, our mission is to empower people to change the world.

For more information on the road, visit theroad.org.

We hope you are encouraged by today's message.

Whether it be a Marxist ideology, patriotic constitutional ideology, or Bible-believing, word-rooted, spirit-alite convictions that all boils down to one thing, and that's your worldview.

This is why I've invited my good friend, Dr.

Jeff Myers, to come up and share.

He is the president and CEO of Summit Ministries in Manitou.

Love this guy.

We've known each other for I think over 15 years.

He spoke in the early days of Mountain Springs when I was building that church, and it's just we've stayed in touch.

It's been great.

It's been awesome.

And it's so great to have you, Stephanie, too.

And we love you.

And so let's give a big, huge applause for Stephanie and Jeff.

So come on up.

Stand up, Stephanie.

Stand up, Stephanie.

We love you.

Come on up, bro.

Come on up, Jeff.

Okay, as Jeff comes up, I'm gonna say one more thing.

This is the tagline on his Twitter account.

I love it.

Tell me if this isn't who we are, too.

His tagline says his mission is equipping and supporting the next generation to embrace God's truth and champion a biblical worldview.

Hallelujah.

That's it.

Let's go.

Thank you, Steve.

Wow.

I'm so glad to be with you here at The Road Church.

We had a fun time in the previous service, and they said that you guys are really boring and you never respond or anything like that.

But uh they said just just only do the nine o'clock, you'll be better off.

George Barna of the Polster said that 90% of pastors say that the Bible applies to today's issues, but when they're asked, what issues have you brought up with your congregation?

Only 10% of them have ever said anything.

You do not have that problem with your pastor here at this church.

And so it's fun to be able to come in and give a this isn't, I don't know what to call it exactly, it's not really a sermon because I'm not a pastor.

It's more of a lecture because I'm a philosopher, but if I say the term lecture, then some of you are in your mind are like, oh, this is we're gonna have to just really try to stay awake during this entire time.

But it's the pieces coming together scripturally and through an understanding of the times in which we live that I hope will lead us to a to a single conclusion for this as we walk away that ideas, we live in a world of ideas, that ideas flow in patterns, and we can be people who understand the times and know what we ought to do.

That's where we're headed with the whole time that we have.

Steve mentioned Summit Ministries.

If you've been to Manitou Springs, you may have seen this Grandview Hotel.

This is the antique hotel just up the hillside from downtown Manitou Springs.

Manatee Springs, by the way, I told this to the earlier group, was described in the brilliant New York Times two-word travel review.

Two words, hippie Mayberry.

And it's true, isn't it?

But if you come to downtown Manatee, you see that mysterious stone staircase on the south side of the main street.

If you follow that up to the top of the hill, that's where Summit Ministries is located.

And every year, for 58 years, young adults have gathered at the Summit Ministries to have two-week-long training programs, studying alongside top Christian thought leaders, the best philosophers in the world, the best economists in the world, the best theologians in the world who all love Jesus, getting their questions answered and preparing to be leaders on their university campuses.

Students have come out from that program and are leaders right now, everywhere you look.

Leaders at the Pentagon, leaders in the White House, leaders in business, leaders in every sphere of society, leaders in science, leaders in medicine.

Because they learned at Summit Ministries how important it is to understand the times.

And that what God has to say to us is not something that he says at 9 o'clock or at 1045 on Sunday morning, but that is something he speaks to every hour of the day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Once you take on that mindset, it changes the way you see everything.

It ruins you for watching television news, for example, because you can immediately begin to see when you are being indoctrinated, not informed.

You immediately begin to look at other issues differently, and I'm not talking about conspiracy theories.

I'm just talking about seeing what is really there rather than simply buying the narrative that we are given by people whose agenda does not include our well-being.

We need to be clear about that.

So let me tell you a story that kind of opens this up.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to travel and speak in New York City.

And you can see from this map that New York City is a complicated place.

I think you can see it from the map.

There we go.

In the middle of that map, 11.5 million people live and work.

If you've never been there, it's almost impossible to understand what that is like.

But I was told on this trip we want you to rent a car and drive yourself from location to location.

At the time I was living in a small town in Tennessee.

In my small town in Tennessee, for example, no one would ever dream of blaring their horn at somebody.

In New York City, the horn is the most important part of the steering wheel.

I was really nervous to be there and to try, but I was assured by the people at the rental car counter, there is a map above the passenger visor that you can use if you ever need it.

So I unneeded it almost immediately, and I reached above the passenger visor, and you'll never guess what.

There was a piece of paper up there.

I pulled it out, unfolded it, and it was a map, but unfortunately, it was not this map of New York City, it was this map, Chicago.

Believe me, I would rather be driving here.

This is a city that was designed at least by sixth or seventh graders.

It makes so much sense.

If you get lost, if you miss your turn, you can take a right, right, right, and you're right back to where you were before.

If you did that here in New York City, you'd never be found again.

You know what I mean?

But more important than having a map I like is having a map that describes the contours of the city in which I find myself.

No amount of wishing that I was in Chicago would have enabled me to better navigate the streets of New York.

You see, I have to understand reality for what it really is and then live based on that.

And it's especially important in the complicated world in which we live.

Here in another week or so, Congress will convene.

I had a friend who started an investment fund that only invests in the stock market when Congress is out of session.

Brilliant, brilliant.

But Congress will convene.

They will immediately form 200 committees and subcommittees that will consider 9,500 pieces of legislation, each of which is so long that the total number of pages will be approximately 110,000 pieces of paper.

If you imagine 110,000 pieces of paper, this floor, this ceiling's about 25 feet high, that would go from the floor all the way to the ceiling and 10 feet out onto the roof.

No one ever reads all of this stuff.

No one could possibly ever read it, absorb it, and understand it.

And our lives, believe it or not, are even more complicated.

The media every day produces, you ready for this?

350 billion words.

350 billion words.

Do you remember what Solomon said?

Where words are many, sin is not absent.

There is tremendous confusion about what we are to even know is real, not to mention what we ought to do to move into the future.

So the biblical understanding of this is that we are in a battle.

And it is a spiritual battle.

The material world around us is not all there is.

There is a spiritual reckoning that takes place every moment of the day in every aspect of our lives.

Several years ago, I was speaking to a group, Christian school teachers back east, where there's a very prominent denomination there that is pacifist.

And so I started talking about the nature of this spiritual battle, and a guy came up and confronted me in a pacifistic kind of way.

And said, Why are you using all these battle metaphors?

And I just took him through a few key verses of scripture.

I said, Well, Colossians 2.8 says, see to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy.

Taking somebody captive is an act of violence.

Wouldn't you agree?

Have you ever been taken captive peacefully and nicely?

No, no, it'd be forcefully.

2 Corinthians 10 5.

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up, sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to the obedience of Christ.

That there is a there's a there's a forcefulness to it.

Jesus even said the kingdom of God is forcefully advancing and forceful men take hold of it.

Now, this does not mean that we become, you know, chest bumping idiots and trying to confront everybody around us in society.

It means that we recognize that below everything else, there's a lot more at stake than what meets the eye.

Ephesians 6, 11 and 12, which I'll refer to at several different times, says, put on the whole armor of God.

God's armor, literally the armor that God wears.

Put on God's armor to stand against the wiles of the devil.

That term wiles in the Greek is a fascinating word.

It's actually the word methodio, from which we get our word method.

We are to understand from scripture there is a method to Satan's madness.

Satan did not wake up this morning wondering, well, who should I go after?

Let me have a cup of coffee and think this over, and we'll just see how I can create mischief.

That's the popular culture conception of Satan.

The biblical conception of Satan is that Satan woke up this morning and said, Today I do the next 500 things on my 3,000-year plan.

Like it's very specific and detailed.

And it lives, it works its way out in things that happen in the physical world in our society.

That's why it's so incredibly important for us to understand this key passage, 1 Chronicles 12, 32.

This is one of those weird things that you probably would skip over in your Bible reading because it's just a list, a long list of all of the people who are coming to David's side as he prepares to become king of Israel.

Such and such a tribe brought this many troops, such and such a tribe brought this many troops.

And you kind of, after a while, you sort of, okay, I get it, I get it.

There were some troops.

Okay, so I'm gonna go on to the next passage.

You might skip right over verse 32, which throws the whole thing out of whack.

Because the tribe of Issachar is not listed by how many troops they brought to David's side.

The tribe of Issachar is listed as follows of Issachar, and you'll you're gonna follow along with me on this.

Men who had what?

Understanding of the times.

To what?

To know what Israel ought to do.

They had an understanding of the times and they knew what Israel ought to do.

How many of them?

200.

Wait a second.

Not 40,000?

No, no, 200.

200.

200 chiefs and their kinsmen are the command.

Did they bring troops?

Yes, they did.

But what was the most important thing they brought?

An understanding of the times to know what Israel ought to do.

As my friend Dr.

Bill Brown puts it, one person sincerely committed to a cause is more valuable than a thousand who are merely interested in that cause.

We need to see that our responsibility is to understand the times and know what we ought to do in our own nation.

And it does affect things nationally.

Here's an illustration for you.

Just after World War II, the Korean Peninsula had a decision to make.

Will we follow the atheism of Marxism or will we follow Christianity?

And of course, as you know, there was a division between the two.

There was a war between the two.

And North Korea embraced communistic Marxist atheism.

South Korea embraced Christianity.

This does not mean that most people in South Korea are even Christian.

But if you've been to South Korea, you know that the Christians who are there are really serious.

I could never keep up with them.

They would stay up till midnight, one o'clock in the morning, visiting, and they would say prayer meeting begins at 5:30 from 5:30 to 7:30.

Every single morning they prayed.

They wanted God to touch their nation.

And over time it made a difference.

Did it make a difference on day one?

Probably not.

Week one?

Probably not.

Year one?

Maybe a little bit.

But over the course of 50-some years, the difference is now crystal clear.

Let me show you a picture of the Korean peninsula from a satellite at night.

South Korea, you see the border there, well lit and prosperous.

North Korea literally in the dark ages.

Ideas have consequences.

So what are the ideas that are at play in our own society?

Because it would be easy to say it's a battle of truth versus falsehood.

There are only two sides.

It's really easy.

There's more texture to it than that.

There are actually, I believe, at least five counterfeit worldviews vying for our attention today.

There could be more worldviews, in fact, I'm sure there are.

I remember several years ago in Great Britain, they said, we're going to do a national survey, and one of the things we're going to be asking you is what your religion is.

So British people, being British people, said, let's trick them.

And they did little campaigns.

Write this down, write this down.

300 some thousand people, it turned out when they finished the survey were Jedi.

8,000 some people worship heavy metal music, right?

Which was really funny because they like they like Aussie.

They like Black Sabbath, right?

Some people like Black Sabbath, some people worship Black Sabbath.

But but the point was there are lots of different worldviews out there.

I would summarize it in these five because I think if you look at the world that we're in now, there are these five, plus Christianity, that are vying for our attention every day.

So we have the Christian worldview, the Islamic worldview, secular worldview, Marxist worldview, new spiritualist worldview, and postmodern worldview.

I want to talk about each of these five, but let me first of all explain why I use that term counterfeit.

A counterfeit, by definition, is an imitation of a thing that intends to defraud by passing itself off as the original.

I was traveling in Korea, walking down the street in a shopping area in Seoul, and a man came up to me and said, Hey, do you want to buy a real fake Rolex?

I didn't know what to say.

I did know that sarcasm does not translate well into other languages.

But what I wanted to say was, are you sure it's a real fake?

How fake is your fake?

Because a fake fake in English means that it's real, right?

So what he was telling me is, my watch is so fake that it will fake out more people.

These counterfeit ideas, what makes a counterfeit Rolex valuable to people?

Not that it's a Rolex, but that it looks like a Rolex, right?

Which people would desire.

So it's not, in fact, the design, if it looked nothing like a Rolex, people wouldn't want it, no matter how cheap it was.

You see the point?

So people will sometimes embrace a false worldview because they like a little piece of it here or there, and then they get tricked into believing the whole thing.

That's why we have to be so discerning.

So I'm going to go through these, but I'd like to take a few minutes for each one of them, and in a really strange order.

You'll I think the order will make sense to you here in a few minutes.

I want to start with new spirituality.

New spirituality.

New spirituality, by the way, with each one of these worldviews, I'm going to define them by what they say the problem is.

One thing you notice with every worldview is that every worldview proclaims there is a problem.

There is a problem.

What the problem is and how we can be saved from it make up those worldviews.

That's why I tell people every worldview is religious.

I did a Fox News show one time when somebody said, Well, you know, you're a Christian, so you're not neutral.

And I and I said, wait a second, you're saying you are because you're a secularist?

I said, You're religious.

I'm not.

You're the one who's religious, I'm neutral.

I said, Well, the dictionary defines a religion as any set of beliefs about the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe.

You, sir, are very religious.

And there was this five-second pause.

He didn't know what to say.

The host didn't know what to say.

They had never thought about this before.

Nobody is neutral.

Don't let the New York Times or anybody else convince you that they are the neutral source.

Everybody believes something, and below that something is a foundation that they probably won't reveal to you.

All right.

I am preaching.

I am preaching, Steve.

New spirituality, ego is the problem.

I don't mean ego as in I'm an awesome person kind of ego.

I mean ego as in the very identification of me as a me.

Or I as an I, that I am a person separate from everybody else.

New spirituality says this material world is an illusion.

Only the spiritual world exists.

And in the spiritual world, everything is one.

Everything is one.

So there is no right or wrong.

Everything is one.

There is no male or female.

Everything is one.

There is no man or woman.

Everything is one.

Can you see this worldview influencing some of the debates that we have today?

Everything is one.

Some people learn this by studying Hinduism, some people learn it studying Buddhism.

I learned it by watching Star Wars.

Do you remember this?

You remember the scene where you have Obi-Wan Kenobi played by the inimitable Alec Guinness, instructing Luke Skywalker about the force.

He uses the term the force.

And Luke says, The Force?

And Alec says, or the Obi-Wan says to him, The Force is what gives the Jedi its power.

It's an energy field made up of all living things.

It penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.

That's my best imitation of Alec Inners.

Thank you.

You're very kind.

And of course, Luke is looking at him like, what?

He doesn't understand either.

The very idea that thinking of distinctions is part of the problem.

That if I think of myself as separate from you, that that's the original sin?

And that only by ridding ourselves of any sense of individuality can we experience healing?

That's the new spiritualist worldview.

You say, Well, I'm glad nobody at church.

Believes that well, here's a study we did in 2017.

72% of Christian church-attending millennials strongly agree, or agree somewhat, that meaning and purpose come from being one with all that is.

72% of Christian churchgoers who are in the millennial generation, those would be the ones in their 20s and 30s.

The only generation, by the way, that didn't fall for this was the elders.

Those who were in their 70s, looking at this, saying, I have nothing to gain by pleasing you, and I'm telling you, that idea is crazy.

Okay?

That's the only but everybody else was on board with it.

Yeah, sounds good to me.

New spirituality.

Second worldview I want to talk about is you'll see you see this in the news all the time, right?

Marxism.

Marxism.

Marxism says there is a problem in the world, and the problem is the rich.

Now, why would a Marxist say that?

Not because they feel sorry for poor people, but because there is an underlying belief that only the material world exists.

You see how that's different from new spirituality?

New spirituality says only the spiritual world exists, the material world is an illusion.

The Marxist says only the material world exists, the spiritual world is an illusion.

There's no God, no Jesus, no Holy Spirit, no heaven, no hell, no angels, no demons.

And Marx, Karl Marx was firm about this, as have been every single one of his major followers since that time.

In fact, it was Marx who was asked, do you think that priests could ever, you know, because he he was basically saying, abolish the church, kill the priests.

Do you think that we could ever have any pastors or religious people who could ever join us?

And he said, okay, I guess they could, but only because we know that they will very quickly abandon their belief in God once they become Marxists.

There was no, this is one of the clearest divisions that there is in society, that these two worldviews are worlds apart, of Christianity and Marxism.

But why would the Marxists say the rich are the problem?

Okay, think of it this way.

If only the material world exists, if only the material world exists, then the only value there is is material things like land, trees, the stuff that you can dig out of the ground and mines.

So if everybody is equal and one person has more material than another person, that's because they stole it.

There is no other explanation.

They stole it.

And you should take it back.

That is not wrong.

I had a student say to me, Well, I'm a democratic socialist, I don't believe in using bullets.

I said, the difference between Marxism and democratic socialism is that Marxists advocate the use of bullets, democratic socialists advocate the use of ballots in order to confiscate all of the wealth and redistribute it.

The ultimate goal is the same, it's just trying to get people to vote for it.

And every Marxist who has ever lived, we could do a whole lecture on this, every Marxist who has ever lived started out saying they are democratic socialists, every one of them, including in North Korea.

Okay, so the Marxist worldview says the rich are the problem because only the material world exists.

It's all about redistributing material resources.

By the way, the Christian response to that is no, in the beginning, God.

God existed before the material world did.

Our ideas matter, inspiration matters, innovation matters.

These things really exist, and they can create wealth and bring people out of poverty all over the world, and that is exactly what's going on around the world today.

So Marxism, the richer the problem.

Do people really believe this?

Well, in the church, we discovered that 83% of Christian church-attending millennials strongly agree, or agree somewhat, that the root of society's problem is that rich people exploit the system in a way that hurts the working class.

Okay, that is that's the way it's phrased in a Marxist worldview.

So that's a dominant thought in the church today.

A third worldview that we focus on at Summit Ministries in our two-week programs is the worldview of secularism.

Secularism says religion is the problem.

Secularism, like Marxism, is a materialist worldview.

Only the material world exists.

There's nothing outside of the material world.

So if somebody says there is something outside of the material world, like God, they're gonna mess everything up.

They're gonna make society horrible.

So we have to stop them from doing that.

The Marxist view of God and the secular view of God are the same understanding.

So God would be to a secularist, like you would talk about God in the way you would talk about the Easter bunny or the tooth fairy or something like that.

Something you might teach to children to make them feel better, but that we all know doesn't really exist.

I was speaking at a conference several years ago, and a lady asked me, Do you believe in God?

Yes.

Do you believe that God is everywhere present?

She asked me.

And I said, I do.

She glared at me and said, I would never teach my child that.

And I asked her, why not?

She said, Because it's creepy.

And I thought, all right.

From a Christian perspective, what she said doesn't make any sense.

But I have to understand she's operating from a different worldview.

From her worldview, from a secular worldview, it is creepy.

Like if you told your child they lose their tooth, right, and they're all upset.

Don't worry, baby, because when you go to bed, you put your tooth under the pillow, and in the morning the tooth fairy will put money there.

If you then said, and the tooth fairy is going to haunt you for the rest of your life if you ever do anything bad, that's pretty manipulative, right?

That would be creepy.

This is creepy in the way that Santa Claus is creepy.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

He sees you when you are sleeping.

He knows when you're awake.

Santa Claus is a stalker.

I had to wait till January 3rd to say that, but it's true.

If your reaction to Santa Claus growing up was like this, that's totally normal.

So what was this lady, what would she say?

Like she said, I would teach my child about God.

If my child says, I'm mommy, I'm having a bad dream, well, then I'll pray that God will give you good dreams.

She does not believe that God exists.

God is a tool she uses to psych her kid into having good dreams.

So then to say God is everywhere was creepy and manipulative, right?

From a secular worldview, you can see how somebody would think this way.

Most Christians today think this way.

Here's a little bit of information from our research.

And then I'm going to use that quotation here in just a minute.

63% of Christian church attending millennials strongly agree, or agree somewhat, that what is morally right and wrong changes over time based on society.

It's not decided by God.

We decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong.

This worldview is making a play big time right now.

So go back to that quotation.

There's a group called the Democratic, so our secular democrats of America.

We got a hold of this from a PR firm that we work with.

They recently sent a 28-page letter of policy demands to Joe Biden, hoping that he would become president of the United States.

In the letter, they say, quote, disregard for science and disdain for expertise have reached an all-time high in this administration of magical thinkers and conspiracy theorists.

We believe that now is the right time to disentangle government policy from the influence of sectarian religious interests that have become dangerously entrenched at all levels of government.

In other words, we want the Christians out.

Why?

Because we want in.

When somebody says, well, you know, there's nobody really knows what is right or what is wrong.

I guarantee you, whenever somebody says that, what's going to follow is what they believe is right.

What they want is not to convince you there's no such thing as right or wrong.

What they want is for you to put your guard down so they can tell you what is right according to their perspective.

That's exactly what is going on here.

All right.

Next worldview.

Postmodernism.

Postmodernism, they really go for it.

They just go for it.

They say, anyone who claims to know the truth of any kind is the problem.

They look back and say, look, everything bad that ever happened is because somebody believed something strongly enough that they were willing to hurt other people who disagreed.

So if we just stop believing anything, except for the belief that we should not believe anything, then we will all be fine.

Reality cannot be discovered by us.

We'll never be able to discover it.

All we have are our words.

This is why people say things like, or like Oprah Winfrey said this in a speech.

She said, learn to speak your truth.

Why does she say your truth?

Because she does not believe there is the truth that she's trying to discover.

She's just saying, learn how to use words cleverly to make people do what you want.

It is all about the words.

And I'm telling you, I had to study this in my doctoral program in philosophy.

Here's one of my favorite quotations from that.

Martin Heidegger wrote this in the German.

You're supposed to translate it into English.

Doesn't make any sense in German or in English.

But here it is.

He said, In the naming, the things named are called until they are thing.

Thinging, they unfold world in which things abide, and so are the abiding ones.

By thing, things carry out world.

And all God's people said, Huh?

What's He saying?

There's no there there when it comes to truth.

It's only how we talk about it.

That's the postmodern worldview.

You recognize any of these?

And I some of you might be like, Darn it, I knew there was something wrong with what that person was saying, and I didn't know till just this moment what was wrong with it.

But see, what's happening in your mind and in your heart is not that you're becoming cynical, it's that you're becoming discerning.

And that's a good thing.

The final counterfeit worldview that I want to talk about before I go back and talk about the Christian worldview is the worldview of Islam.

Islam, to many people, looks very similar to Christianity because both proclaim that there is a God.

And that God is not a force like Star Wars, but God is actually person has a personality.

Islam is very, very different from Christianity, however.

And in many different ways.

We could have a whole talk on this, but in this primary way, Islam says the problem we all have is not that we have sinned and gone our own way away from God.

The problem is that we are in rebellion against Allah, and that is not our natural state.

To Islam, every person who has ever been born was born a Muslim.

Everybody here is Muslim.

The problem is, if you're not Muslim, you don't consider yourself Muslim, it means you're in rebellion against Allah.

And the cure for rebellion, according to the Quran, is this word right here, jihad.

That is the cure.

And there are two different perspectives.

The one a majority of Muslims in the world hold is that this is a call to self-discipline.

Discipline yourself to cease your rebellion against Allah, in the same way, maybe that we might talk about fasting or prayer.

A minority view, but held by enough people that there are some 200 million people in the world who fiercely believe this, is that jihad is a form of force that you can force people to do what you say God wants them to do, and that is a legitimate thing.

That is honoring to God.

Now you look at this and think, okay, so who on earth in the church would ever believe something like this?

Well, here's something from our study.

50%, 50% of Christian church-attending millennials strongly agree or agree somewhat that the root of society's problem is failing to make society submit to God by force if necessary.

That is at the heart of an Islamic worldview, and Christians fall for it.

Hook, line, and sinker.

In response to this, I want us to understand something about how a Christian worldview works.

Notice that these different worldviews either say the material world exists and the spiritual world is an illusion, or the spiritual world exists and the material world is an illusion.

At this time of the year, we've just finished celebrating Advent, which is that God, as a spiritual being, exists and brought his son into the world to save it.

That it is the convergence of both the material and the spiritual worlds, that Christianity answers the questions raised by the others.

So from a Christian worldview, through God, we can know truth, find salvation, and then work toward freedom and prosperity.

I could, if we had more time, I would just take world maps.

I could just show this to you over and over again.

If you take all of the countries in the world that have a Christian origin, you will notice that they are one-to-one the countries in the world that have religious freedom.

Now, what that means is it's freedom for everybody.

If you are an atheist or a member of the LGBTQ community or a minority, the safest place for you to be in the whole world is in a country that embraces Jesus Christ.

And everybody knows this.

One LGBTQ travel website lists the top 25 safest countries for LGBTQ people to visit.

All 25 are Christian majority countries.

All 25.

Religious freedom leads to political freedom, leads to economic freedom.

I always think that's fascinating because I don't want to say that this is what Jesus meant, but it is interesting that Jesus said, if the sun sets you free, you will be free indeed.

You will be free completely.

So this is really important for us to understand about the Christian worldview.

And I'm not the only one who says this.

Even atheists who are honest will acknowledge this.

Luke Ferry is a French philosopher, wrote a book called A Brief History of Thought.

Don't let that trick you into thinking it's a brief book to read or easy.

But he says in the book, chapter one, look, I know this is going to make all my fellow atheists mad, but it is to Christianity, not to Rome or Greece, that Western civilization owed its entire democratic inheritance.

He said, it is Christians who believed that we bear God's image that made all of this happen.

Okay, real quickly, we didn't get to this in the first service, but we can get to this now.

How do we respond to this?

I would suggest we start by asking questions.

The first goal when you encounter an enemy's strategy is to unmask the strategy for what it is.

And you do that by asking questions.

I'm looking at Chris here, who's the debate guy, right?

Asking questions is the thing.

So here's how you here's how you would do this.

You would start by saying something like this.

I'm a little puzzled.

Isn't that easy to say?

Just say it.

I'm a little puzzled.

Is it true?

Yeah.

I'm a little puzzled.

Then you can say something like this question, question number one.

What do you mean by that?

Define the terms.

What do you mean by that?

A buddy of mine, we are visiting with this guy who's an atheist.

Do you believe that God exists?

No, God doesn't exist.

Well, what do you mean by God?

Oh, you know, God is the big grandfather figure in the sky, throws lightning bolts down on people he doesn't like.

And we're like, Zeus?

We actually have common ground here.

I don't believe in Zeus.

No, but it's funny, but it's amazing how many times we just fail to define our terms.

Somebody says, I think it's a battle between the rich and the poor.

What do you mean by the rich?

What do you mean by the poor?

You know, give get define all of those terms.

Second is to dispute.

You can do this through a question.

You can dispute what somebody says.

Do you think that's the whole story?

I had a professor in college who came to us in class one day, and professors, poor guys, always trying to make themselves relevant.

And so he said to us, I can describe the whole of Judeo-Christian history in one sentence.

God is a mean bully.

All I have to do is raise my hand and say, Professor, do you think that's the whole story?

He responded, Well, of course, I'm just summarizing.

You think 4,000 years of history in one sentence?

Do you think that's the whole story?

And all of a sudden they realized the climate of the entire room had shifted.

Now my classmates saw me as the open-minded person and the professor as the closed-minded one.

He had to work to regain credibility, which is perfectly legit in that situation.

Does that make sense?

Questions.

Third, decipher.

How did you arrive at that conclusion?

It hurts me not in the least to let the other person talk for a while.

Doesn't hurt me in the least.

Let them go on.

How did you arrive at that conclusion?

Fourth question is to plant seeds of doubt.

How do you know that what you believe is true?

It's crazy about this question.

The guy who first taught this to me was a biochemistry PhD student at the University of Colorado.

He's kind of smart.

He said, you'd be amazed how many people are the most brilliant people in their field who have no idea why they believe what they believe.

He said, So always ask.

How do you know that what you believe is true?

It turns out that the people, even people who say there is no truth, do believe that is a true statement.

You see that?

So you can always ask this question.

How do you know that what you believe is true?

And then the final question, and I'll give I'll just give a funny example and then we'll draw this to a conclusion.

I think it's funny.

We'll see.

Shouldn't have just I created a narrative for you right there, see?

We like the speaker.

We have to believe this is funny.

Dwell.

Give people something to dwell on.

What happens if you are wrong?

At some ministries, one of our speakers named Alan Schlemann says, put a pebble in their shoe.

Is that a great metaphor or what?

When you have a pebble in your shoe, it doesn't matter that it's that big and your body is this big.

All you can feel and think about is that pebble in your shoe.

What happens if you are wrong?

I went to the University of Denver.

I loved being on campus because people were constantly setting up tables, handing out literature.

Which means that they're inviting you to come talk to them, which means you can come and ask questions.

So on Animal Rights Day, I went up to a table.

I said, What are you doing?

Well, we're saving the harp seal pups.

Why?

He showed me a picture.

They're adorable.

Adorable.

They're so cute.

White fluffy things with big black eyes.

And he said, people club them over the head, take off their skins, and turn them into coats.

And I'm thinking, why would they do that?

We have Gore-Tex now.

We don't have to let them wear their coat.

We don't need to wear I'll wear my coat.

But I asked him, why do you care about this?

And he revealed his worldview.

He said, Who are we to say that we are any better than any other creature?

Well, that is an opening big enough to drive a truck through.

And I'm driving.

We're going.

We're going.

I said, Well, I don't think you're consistent with that.

He said, What do you mean?

I said, Well, do you bathe?

You honestly, some of these people, you have to ask the question.

But um, yes, I bathe.

You use shampoo, yes.

I said, have you ever thought about the dust mites that live on your body and what that shampoo does to them?

Put up a picture of the dust mite.

You can kind of see that.

Now that one is expanded.

Just don't worry.

That's a bigger picture.

They're not really that big.

It's that one's blown up.

Okay.

Dust mites are everywhere.

I mean, you they live, they float around in the dust, they get in your body, they colonize in your hair.

I said, You know what the shampoo does to the dust mites?

He said, No.

I said, Well, the shampoo goes inside their little bodies and they swell up and they explode and they die and wash down the drain dead.

He said, Why are you telling me this?

I said, Because you said, who are we to say that we are any better than any other creature?

And I just want to know how you justify being a mass murderer of dust mites.

He thought that was funny.

I'm glad.

And we ended up in a discussion about how we would know whether something really has value.

We didn't come to an agreement on it, but I promise you, he understood something from a biblical worldview better than he ever has.

And I understood a little more the nature of the battle that we're facing when people can't even understand how we would agree on what living creature has value.

Does that make sense?

So you use question.

You can take that picture off the screen.

We've seen that enough.

But this is really important because we need to understand that Satan is alive and well.

And we also need to understand that if there is a reporter from the newspaper in this room right now, that they're going to report what I just said as totally crazy.

But not because they're neutral and we're not, but because they are operating from a particular worldview that cannot admit that anything we say from the Bible is true.

Does that make sense?

That should help us be relieved of some of our fear and our trepidation.

It should help relieve us when somebody says, Are you a total idiot?

How could you believe what you believe?

Recognize that that is an attack that's coming from their worldview that they have not proven to be true to try to disarm you so that you will submit to their worldview.

Once you see these things as a battle of worldviews, then everything changes.

You read the news differently, you watch the news differently, you have conversations that work differently.

All of that is really valuable because it's helpful, it's part of, I believe, God putting on his armor on us and preparing us to stand against the wiles of the devil.

And for a lot of people, it's very personal, isn't it?

I mean, we can we can laugh and joke a little bit and have fun at our own expense and sometimes at other people's.

But the truth is, some of what I've said, some of your hearts are really hurting right now because you're saying, My kid, I now get it.

She's totally bought into that wrong worldview.

Or I don't know what to say at work anymore.

The environment is so politically correct that I can't say anything.

I just end up being quiet, silent when I know I should be speaking up.

James says, if any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God who gives freely.

And that's what I'd like for you to pray for yourself and for me and for all of us.

We recognize that this is a battle.

It is not a battle against other people, it is a battle against the principalities and powers.

And because of that, we have the opportunity now to pray and intercede for one another and to beg God for wisdom because he promises that he will get it.

You've been listening to The Road.

We hope you have been blessed by today's message.

To connect with us further, visit theroad.org.

If you are walking through a difficult time, we want to pray for you.

Go to theroad.org, click on the ministries tab, and go to our prayer page to send us your prayer request.

Thank you for tuning in today, and be sure to listen to the next edition of The Road.