"Understanding the Times"

Dear Friends in Christ, 

   As most of you know, Marilyn and I recently made what has pretty well become our annual trek to Branson, Missouri where we attended another Worldview Weekend Conference.  Now before I go any further, I want to make one thing very clear.  This trip is not a vacation.  Some of you have asked how we enjoyed our vacation to Branson.  But it’s not a vacation.  It’s a conference where we spend approximately 13 hours over 2 days listening to some of the most gifted speakers you’ll ever hear, as well as enjoying some absolutely wonderful times of worship.  So having said that, let me also say that there was a real spirit of concern that hovered over this particular conference and that could be heard in the messages that were delivered.  That concern stemmed from the direction that our country has been heading and different policies that our government has been considering and adopting that conflict with the Bible. 

   So what I want to do today and then next week is spend my time taking a look at these challenges that we are facing today as American Christians and what we can do about them.  The theme for my sermon today is “Understanding the Times” and my message next week will be entitled “The 7000 Club.”  Not the 700 Club, like the program on television, but “The 7000 Club.”  If you want to know what I mean by that you’ll have to come back next week to find out.

   But for today let’s talk about this whole idea of “Understanding the Times.”  I get that theme from our text for today where one of the tribes of Israel, namely, the tribe of Issachar, is described as those “who understood the times.”  The note in my Life Application Bible explains this a little bit further when it says: “The 200 chiefs from the tribe of Issachar ‘understood the times.’  As a result, their knowledge and judgment provided needed help in making decisions for the nation.  For leaders today it is equally necessary to know what is happening in society in order to plan the best course of action for the church.  Knowledge of current events, trends, and needs helps us understand people’s thoughts and attitudes.”  So we need to understand the times we are living in to know how we as the Body of Christ can most effectively minister to and meet the spiritual needs of those around us.

   What, then, are the times we’re living in?  How could we best describe them?  As I thought about that, I came up with 3 phrases that I want to spend my time focusing upon this morning.  First of all, these are dark times.  The catch word that we kept hearing over and over again from both sides in last year’s presidential campaign was what?  CHANGE.  Well, there’s no doubt about it.  Times are changing in our country, big time!  To give us some perspective here, I want to take you back to some of our founding fathers, most of whom had a profound love and respect for God and the Bible and many of whom were leaders in their churches.  For example, John Adams, the 2^nd President of the United States, once noted: “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were…the general principles of Christianity…Now I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable (unchangeable) as the existence and attributes of God.”  Or how about these words that come from James Madison who is considered the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution: “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it.  We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”  And then there was Daniel Webster, the great statesman, orator, and lawyer, who said: “If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.”

   My friends, I could go on and on like this with one quote after another from our founding fathers that reflect their total reliance and dependence upon God and the Bible for the present and future well-being of our nation.  And not only was this reflected in our government, it was also taught ever so strongly in our schools.  You’ve heard me talk about the basic textbook that was used in our nation’s schools, first in the colonies and then in the states, all the way into the 20^th century.  It was called The New England Primer.  It made use of Bible passages, prayers, and Bible stories to teach the abc’s, history, music, Christian doctrine, and lots of moral lessons.  It even contained a catechism, which is simply a book of questions and answers, all of which related to the Bible.  That catechism asked and answered questions like: What is the chief end of man? What do the Scriptures principally teach?  What is sin?  Who is the Redeemer of God’s elect?  What is justification?  What is adoption?  What is sanctification?  Many seasoned Christians today would be hard-pressed to answer those questions, but they were standard fare for the youngest of school children back then.

   But my, how times have changed.  In 1962 a Supreme Court decision removed prayer from public schools.  Then the following year it did the same with Bible reading.  Then in 1980 the court ruled that the 10 Commandments could no longer be displayed in public schools.  And in its official opinion in that case, it stated why.  It said: “If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments.”  I’ve talked to enough teachers in recent years to know that they wouldn’t mind one bit if their students did those things.  Perhaps it would create a much better learning environment in their classrooms rather than the chaos and inattentiveness that they tell me is so prevalent instead.

   The point I’m getting at here is that little by little the Christian foundation upon which our nation was built has been chiseled away, creating the dark times that we are living in today, times that I believe the Apostle Paul foresaw when he wrote his 2 letter to Timothy and he said: “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.”

   And because of all that we’ve talked about so far, these are not only dark times that we are living in, they are also scary times.  For the Bible makes it very clear to us that we can push God only so far before he pushes back and we begin to experience his judgment.  We call that the law of sowing and reaping.  In Gal. 6:7-8 the Apostle Paul says: “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.”  In my morning devotions I recently finished the book of Judges, which is one of the best examples of this sowing and reaping principle.  In that book we find a recurring cycle that the Israelites went through at that point in their history.  It started with rebellion against God which usually came in the form of idolatry, or worshiping false gods and idols.  Then would come God’s retaliation or judgment where he would use foreign nations to chastise and discipline his people.  Then the people would repent and God would relent and send them a rescuer in the form of one of the judges like Gideon or Jephthah or Samson.  But then after a while, they would rebel again and the whole cycle would repeat itself.  The one verse that summarizes the book of Judges more than any other and that is found a couple of different times in it says: “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.”

   Sounds very similar to the time in which we are living today.  In fact, that phrase “everyone did as he saw fit” pretty well describes the postmodern mindset that pervades our land today where the common belief is that there are no absolute rights and wrongs anymore, there is no absolute truth like we find in the Bible, so everyone has to create their own.  It is this way of thinking that has led us down the slippery slope of judgment that the Apostle Paul describes for us in Rom. 1 where in v. 18 he says: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”  Paul then goes on to describe what that slippery slope would look like.  I would encourage you to read it sometime this week, but just to briefly summarize it for you, the farther a nation gets from God, the more foolish they become in their thinking, the more immoral and depraved they become in their actions, and the more violent and debased they become in their culture until they finally reach the point where Paul says “they invent ways of doing evil.” (v.30) 

   Or consider what God told the Israelites in Deut. 28.  In vv. 1-2 Moses says: “If you fully obey the LORD your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations on earth.  All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the LORD your God.”  Then he spends the next 12 verses describing those blessings.  But then in v. 15 he says: “However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you.”  I’d encourage you to read this chapter this week as well as Rom. 1:18ff because Moses then uses the next 53 verses to describe those curses of judgment, many of which we see happening in our own country right now. 

   So these are dark times in which we are living.  These are scary times as we find ourselves as a nation coming under God’s judgment.  But I would also say in my final point that these are times of great opportunity.  This is not a time to stand around wringing our hands in fear like everyone else is doing these days.  Rather, this is a time for those of us who have the hope of Christ in our hearts to share that hope with others.  This is the time for those of us who have the good news of the Gospel to be proclaiming that good news loudly and clearly in the midst of all this bad news.  This is the time for God’s people to be what Jesus called us to be in his Sermon on the Mount when he said that we are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world and a city set on a hill.  More than ever we who know Christ as our Lord and Savior need to live as though he is Lord and Savior. 

   One thing that history has proven time after time after time is that the church thrives best and grows most during times of persecution.  It’s during times of economic and material prosperity that we lose our focus, that we become complacent, that we begin to treat the church like a convenience store that we come to only when we feel a need for it rather than treating it like a filling station that we need to regularly go to in order to receive the fuel and the faith that we need to complete this journey called life.  Go to the areas of the world where persecution is greatest, in places like China, Sudan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and so on, and you will find vibrant, active, healthy Christian churches there because they know what it’s like to have to do without the Bible and without church buildings and their faith has come to mean the world to them.  So as much as I don’t want to see that happen here, God may very well feel that a good dose of persecution is just what this country needs to wake up the sleeping giant of the church and help us see all that we stand to lose if we don’t start taking our faith more seriously.

Amen.