INTOLERANT: ANSWERING THE INDICTMENT

INTOLERANT: ANSWERING THE INDICTMENT John 15:18-25 With grateful acknowledgement of these sources of direction and inspiration: the Holy Spirit; the Word of God; Kenneth D. Boa and Robert Bowman, An Unchanging Faith in a Changing World; Ravi Zacharias, Deliver Us From Evil, Can Man Live Without God, and Light in theShadow of Jihad; Franklin Graham, The Name; Lee Stroebel, The Case for Faith; Josh McDowell Tolerance (www.josh.org/project911/tolerance.asp) Feb 23, 2003 Given by: Pastor Rich Bersett [Index of Past Messages] Introductory Jesus gave a warning to His disciples just a short time before His death. It was a warning about the persecution they would soon face, and why they would face it. Our text is at John 15:18-25 "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the One who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them they would not be guilty of sin. Now, however, they have no excuse for their sin. He who hates me hates my Father as well. If I had not done among them what no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin. But now they have seen these miracles, and yet they have hated both me and my Father. But this is to fulfill what is written in their Law: 'They hated me without reason.'" Have you ever felt like an outsider in this world because of your faith? Ever felt uncomfortable, lonely or weird because you stand for the truth of the gospel? Have you ever been teased, ridiculed or even assaulted for speaking out for Christ, or even just biblical values? If you have, Good! This is exactly what disciples of Jesus are to expect. I want to encourage you in your stand for Christ in an unappreciative culture. First, I want to remind you that you can be thankful for the freedom you have in  America that allows you to worship the Lord, and to share your faith with others. Secondly, remember that Jesus said, when you are persecuted for His sake and people speak evil of you, "Rejoice, and be glad-your reward in heaven will be great" [webmasters note: Matthew 5:12] because the prophets who went before you were likewise persecuted. And there is one more thing for which you can be grateful in the midst of feeling like an alien as a witness for Christ is this world. Frankly, we can be thankful that we are not in a part of the world where to speak out for Christ brings more than ridicule and loss of friendship. In many parts of the world today you may be imprisoned for your witness, you may be threatened and your family threatened, or you might face a brutal death. While we enjoy great freedom to practice and promote the Christian faith in America, there is an obvious, growing trend of antagonism, if not animosity, that is rising in our culture. The evidence is everywhere, from the disappearance of Bibles from classrooms, to the disappearance of nativity scenes in public places, to the disappearance of the Ten Commandments from the walls of the courthouses, to the legalized removal of the name of God or Jesus from all places public. Increasingly, through print and film media, Christians are becoming the target of an irrational prejudice. The horribly mutated misuse of the principle of the separation of church and state has kept the ACLU busy, Christians confused and public school educators paranoid. Recently a biology professor at a state school in California decided evolution was for the monkeys and taught creation in his classes. As a result, the university placed an observer in all his lectures to be sure he was not losing his academic respectability. No one thought to monitor the atheist in the same school who systematically ran roughshod over Christian students. (Lloyd H. Ahlem in The Covenant Companion) We cannot mention the name of God in our classrooms, but in the name of cultural sensitivity, dozens of schools in California are required to teach a course in Islam, including, of course, direct mention of the name of their God, Allah. Should I even mention the filibuster over the nomination of a Christian to a federal judgeship? And it is not politics; it's fear of Christian values. What has happened in our country that has brought us to the place where 230 years after we founded this nation on Christian principles we are under such threat for public proclamation of those very values? In the next few moments I want to try to make sense out of what has happened, and then illustrate the spiritual nature of the issues. I would like to talk about three terms representing three trends that have coalesced in the last (only) 30 years or so, bringing us to where we are today. 1. Pluralism Pluralism is the peaceful coexistence of differing ideas, philosophies and religions. It really is a picture of what was in the dreams of the founding fathers of America-a land where religious liberty could be a reality. Fleeing from a country where only one brand of faith was endorsed by the government, the new Americans, though tempted to make Christianity the state religion, determined to grant freedom for all expressions of religious faith. What was written into our Constitution, then, was a call for the kind of respect and tolerance toward one another that would be necessary in order for a pluralistic culture to survive. In a nutshell, we Americans promised one another we would allow one another to practice whatever faith we pleased, and that we would honor our various choices. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are healthy, necessary components of a free society, encouraging people from differing persuasions to engage in the free exchange of ideas. In that way, we cannot only grow to understand one another, and hopefully benefit from what is learned. From a strictly Christian point of view, this principle gives us a wonderful opportunity to preach the gospel. But something has gone horribly wrong, and the rights of Christians, uniquely, are coming under increasing prejudice. When this happens to any particular group this next issue is clouded. 2. Tolerance Tolerance is, of course, a key ingredient in a pluralistic society. Tolerance is recognizing and respecting the beliefs and practices of others without necessarily agreeing or sympathizing. That is, as an American citizen, I may not agree with the principles espoused by the local Mosque. In fact, I may not even like having the Mosque in the neighborhood, but I voluntarily exercise tolerance because that group has just as much right to practice their faith as I do. Now, originally, this is what tolerance meant-it is actually the definition of the word. But, if you've lately been getting a funny feeling when you encounter the term "tolerance" in the media, it's because the meaning of the word has changed on the popular front and has mutated into a politically correct form.. Today, if you are tolerant, it usually means you consider every individual's beliefs, values, lifestyles, and truth claims as equally valid. Do you see the critical difference between these two definitions? Let me illustrate with a current topic. Under the real definition of "tolerance," I may say that I do not agree with the practice of homosexual behavior, but in a free society, others are free to do so as long as it is legal and is not bringing harm. I am also permitted, under the proper definition of tolerance to teach the biblical approach to homosexuality, which is that it is sin against the holy God. However, under the popular, current definition of tolerance, which has become politically correct, I am not permitted any longer to speak against that sin, because I am under an obligation to not only recognize and respect others' rights, but I am also expected to agree with the principles of homosexuality. Tolerance has somehow become the "highest virtue." You are a nice and acceptable person only if you are "tolerant" in these terms. If you are not in agreement with the practice, at least you shouldn't speak against it. And if you do, you become part of that cast of people who are the worst of all - the "intolerant"! Never mind that it is sin and God has clearly revealed His will in the matter, calling it a sin. The same thing holds true for other beliefs and behaviors that are biblically wrong and morally reprehensible. And you become religious freak if and when you speak out against them. Christians are always getting labeled intolerant because so many in our culture have come to mistakenly understand tolerance as tacit agreement. So it becomes politically incorrect to assume our prophetic place in culture, denouncing sin and loving the sinners. In fact, we Christians have become the worst moral offenders of all because we are religious and intolerant. Now, Jesus indicated our whipping boy status among the pagans would be strange. "They hated me without reason/cause." [webmasters note: John 15:25] He was quoting from Psalm 69:4. The rest of that verse from the pen of David reads, "Those who hate me without reason outnumber the hairs of my head; many are my enemies without cause, those who seek to destroy me." The Christian community has even received this charge of being intolerant from other religionists, usually those who truly are intolerant. In some Hindu societies Christian church buildings are burned and pastors and missionaries are killed because they testify to the one true God. Among Islam's basic teaching is intolerance for those who follow other faiths. We hear much today about how peace-oriented Islam is, but in their holy writings it says, "One (military) raid for the cause of god (Allah) is better than seventy hajj (pilgr../../images to Mecca.)" Of course, not all Muslims practice this doctrine or try to harm those of other faiths, but we cannot lose sight of the fact that Islam is a proselytizing religion, and the Koran promotes holy war and high taxation against non-Muslims in order to make them submit to Islam. Quoting from Sura 9:29, "Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book [Jews and Christians], until they pay the tax in acknowledgement of superiority and they are in a state of subjection." On September 11 we were looked in the face by a deed done by Muslims who understood themselves to be acting out Muslim ideals. William Buckley wrote in the National Review, "It is all very well for individual Muslim spokesmen to assert the misjudgment of the terrorist, but the Islamic world is substantially made up of countries that ignore, or countenance, or support terrorist activity." The Koran says, "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and prepare them for ambush." (Surah 9:5) Franklin Graham: "Although there have been disgusting acts done at times by wicked people claiming the name of Jesus, Christ Himself never advocated holy-war tactics, violence, misrepresen- tation, bribery or coercion to make converts." Jesus did predict that those who go in His name would be hated without just reason. It is a testimony to the powers of darkness and to the demonic confusion from hell that tolerant Christians are labeled as the "intolerants". I want to urge parents to teach their children how this word "tolerant" has devolved into its twisted meaning today. Teach them the truth of what it means to be Christians in a pluralist culture, spokespersons for the God who has judged sin and has demonstrated His love for the sinners. Author Josh McDowell put it this way: "Should we be tolerant? Absolutely. We should respect one another even when we disagree. Should we be inclusive? Yes. We should find God's truth even in unlikely places. But tolerance and inclusiveness should be an attitude, not the basis of a belief system, because when beliefs contradict, we've got to choose. Joshua said, 'Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve…. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord' (Joshua 24:15). The third term I'd like us to consider is relativism. 3. Relativism Relativism is the idea that any idea or activity or religious belief should be judged as to its rightness or wrongness not on the basis of some objective standard of truth, but on other, fluctuating bases. That is to say, what is true today may not be true tomorrow; or what is true for you may not be true for me. Truth is relative. There are no absolutes. That is relativism. "…Over the past thirty years, the American mind has been transformed dramatically. One of the most telling examples is our view of truth. In the 1960's, 65 percent of Americans said they believed the Bible is true; today that figure has dropped to 32 percent. Even more dramatically, today 67 percent of all Americans deny that there's any such thing as truth. Seventy percent say there are no moral absolutes." ( Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God? p. ix) One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Can we leave it there? "What I told you was true, from a certain point of view . . . Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." Obi-Wan Kenobi, to Luke Skywalker, in Return of the Jedi (1983) How does truth get so distorted and twisted? It's fairly easy in a pluralist society, where indiscriminate tolerance has been made the new ethic. In America we began with the Christian ethic. The Bible was acknowledged as true and the source of Truth (even though it might not have been practiced). Truth was objective, real - you could point to the standard and say, 'here is what is right and here is what is wrong. "Enlightened" thinkers come along and said, "what we know is not 'out there', it's in here in our minds, the way we process it. We just see truth a little differently from one another. The next step - Truth is subjective - my truth is real to me. My new standard is what seems right to me. Proverbs 14:12 - "There is a way that seems right to a man but the end leads to death." What I know in my mind is that certain things are right and certain things are wrong. The trouble is I am sinful and prone to err in a direction directly AWAY from God. And I am easily influenced with worldly concepts, and I begin to doubt God's Word as authoritative truth because someone said it is passe and I thought, "Hey, that's right". From Light in the Shadow of Jihad, by R. Zacharias: "The relativist who argues for the absence of absolutes smuggles absolutes into his arguments all the time, while shouting loudly that all morality is private belief. Alan Dershowitz, professor at Harvard Law School, spares no vitriol in his pronouncements that there are no absolutes and that's the way it is. 'I do not know what is right,' he contends. It all sounds very honest and real, until he points his finger at his audience and says, 'And you know what? Neither do you.' So it is not just that he does not know what is right. It is also that he knows the impossibility of knowing what is right so well that he is absolutely certain that nobody else can know what is right either. There is his absolute. One need only observe … his views on numerous issues, including his vociferous defense of O.J. Simpson during his murder trial, to see how relativism works itself into society's ethics. Then you go to the other extreme. On the night before Mohammed Atta and his band murderers brought the world to a screaming halt with their suicide mission to 'rid the world of American values,' these specimens of 'moral rectitude' were parked in nude dance clubs, in search of the services of a prostitute. What hypocrisy littered their moral pronouncements! Lies, deceit, sensuality, illegal acts, fake passports, mass murder-all in defense of absolutes. In the face of such duplicity, how do we recognize right and wrong? In the rubble of human failure and destruction, how do we connect with a helping hand to rescue us from falsehood?" "In his book Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer relates the experience of the climbers of Mount Everest in that 1996 expedition that ended up costing the lives of many. One of the chilling stories he recounts is of one group that had just been rescued by another, so that they were able to continue their journey upward. A few hundred feet later, the group that had been rescued now had the opportunity to save the lives of the climbers who had helped them. But rather than risk their own lives, they pressed onward, leaving them to perish. Later, when they had descended the mountain and were asked why they had ignored the plight of these others, their crisp answer was, 'above eight-thousand meters there is no morality.' Once when I was speaking at Oxford University, a small group of students came up to me afterward and insisted that good and bad were not absolute categories. I asked one of them whether it would be wrong for me to take a butcher knife and cut to pieces a one-year-old child for sheer delight. There was a pause, and then he said, to an audible gasp from those listening, 'I would not like what you did, but I could not honestly say that it would be wrong." What is frightening in that account are the obvious implications of what can happen in a society when such non-discriminating amoralism is turned loose. But the one redeeming thing is the "gasp". At least most of them still recognized the implications. The third step - Truth is relative - you know, really, everybody has different ideas, and they're nice people. Who's to say I'm right and they're wrong? It all depends on the person viewing the situation what is true. Soon, every person's opinion has merit. The Bible and its truth has sunk to at least the level of being on a par with all other philosophical ideas. The next step - Nothing is true (who's to say?). Along come a few influential existentialist authors, a hippie-drop-out, self-serving generation and suddenly nothing has validity. Now, no one can speak with authority, because we're all just clueless, even though each of us is enamored with our his "perfect" philosophy of life, you just can't trust anyone's ideas. Now the Bible has almost no respect, so we take it out of the schools and courts. Next - there is such a despair and lostness without absolutes that people find they have to trust someone, something. Suddenly, Everything is true. Hey, whatever you say I'll buy in-as long as my friends like you and you've written a couple of bestsellers or been a movie star. Now God and scripture have been replaced by the popular gurus-and there's no end to the possibilities in a pluralist culture! Take your pick: Hinduism is very chic these days, communism, or maybe a more personality-oriented option-L. Ron Hubbarb (ooh, he's smart!), Shirley MacLaine… the list goes on and on. And the beautiful things is, since it's all truth, you can drop one and go to another any time you like! By the way, if God or your old Bible roots get in the way, just ignore it. If everything is true, then nothing is true again. Truth is neutralized - no one can be trusted - who cares what you think, say? Now truth has evolved all the way to its own death in the culture. And unless there will be enough prayer and salt & light influence in that culture among its believers, and they can raise Truth again to its rightful place, that culture will die. The death rattle of truth is when the culture begins to say to Truth-representers, "What did you sayyyy!?" At this point Truth has become intolerable to the culture. That's where we are. That's why you and your Bible teaching are getting only negative attention. We Christians are at the place in our culture where Jesus said we would be-hated because we identify with Him. And it's just getting started. I wanted to bring this teaching for the same reason Jesus first brought it to those disciples shortly before His death. It was so that they would not be caught be surprise when they were dragged into courts and thrown to lions and beheaded for the sake of the gospel. It's happened in every culture. Peter wrote, "Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you . . . if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name…" (1 Peter 4:12-16) Conclusion What do we do? How are we to act in a culture that is growing increasingly hostile? 1. Understand what is going on. This is Jesus' teaching for disciples - expect trouble. In large part, I'm not certain that the church in our culture is ready for that. We have an easy-believism and a pervasive sense that we have the right to be comfortable and that nothing bad will ever happen to Christians. We must shake off that false doctrine and understand the times. 2. Continue to demonstrate the character and message of Christ. It is the will of the Lord that through us who believe in Him the world will finally understand the truth of the gospel. We must shore up our faith through study of the Word, prayer, genuine fellowship and worship (Acts 2:42). Then we will do the works of Christ in a fallen world: 1. Love. Love sinners and clearly and consistently point out the destructive error of sin. This is TOLERANCE, biblical style. 2. Selfless Service. Whether we are called upon to face ridicule when we stand up in the school board or the court or in front of a TV camera, or whether we are ultimately called upon to be martyrs for our faith, we are to give ourselves in tireless service to the lost around us. 3. Take advantage of freedom of religion as long as we have it. We are in a privileged place, to actually have the freedom to share the gospel. Even though we often feel like Jeremiah preaching to those who will never hear, let us be faithful in this honored stewardship of sharing the gospel. I want to close with an extended quote from Franklin Graham's new book, The Name: "As an American citizen, I have the right to believe as I see fit regardless of what is politically correct. Those who seek to suppress the principles of Christian faith do not realize their peril. A visit to countries where government are under the influence of other religions will reveal just how precious our core freedoms are here in America. God is not tolerant of sin or other religions that lead people into everlasting darkness. The Bible says that there will be a judgment at the appointed time; for He is a jealous God, and clearly there should be no other gods before Him. But in the meantime, this fad of tolerance-which is intolerant of the defenders of the Name-has my stomach churning. As a follower of Jesus Christ I have to confess that I long for a homeland that's far better and more enduring that what the world has to offer. Like the men and women mentioned in the book of Hebrews, I am a stranger and pilgrim on this earth, seeking a 'heavenly country; who maker and builder is God." It seems an odd thing to invite people to become a part of a movement that is under increasing persecution. But that's exactly what I want to do. Jesus called followers who would come after Him by denying themselves, picking up their crosses daily and following Him. Are you ready?     [Back to Top]