Loading summary
Transcript3 lines
- [00:02]
A
Welcome to Faith of Our Fathers. Today we feature John Stott. From an early age, he was an avid bird watcher and photographer, taking his binoculars and camera with him on all of his travels, he saw nearly 2,700 of the world's 9,000 species of birds. He even published a book, the Birds Our Teachers Illustrated with his own photographs. He was an honorary chaplain to the Queen from 1959 to 1991. John Stott was a pastor to pastors, a servant of the global church, and an author of more than 50 books. Today, John Stott presents a sermon titled A Window on the World.
- [00:58]
B
The sermon title that I have been given this morning is Window on the World. And it will not have escaped you that there is a word common to those three expressions, namely the word world. And when Christians see the word world, I think if they are alert, two questions are prompted by the Word in their minds. And the first is, what is the correct meaning of the word world? When the word is used in the Bible, for example, what does it commonly mean? How should Christian people understand the world in biblical terminology? And the second question is, what is the correct attitude that Christian people should adopt towards the world? The correct meaning and the correct attitude. I want to suggest to you that we can find our answers to these important questions in the passage read to us just now. And I would be grateful if you take the church Bible, which is the Gospel of John, chapter 17, and I would like to reread verse 14 to 18, John 17:14. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you should take them out of the world, but but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth. And as you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. Well, if we meditate on those verses, we should be in a position now to answer our first question. What is the correct meaning of the word world? The word actually occurs 15 times in this prayer of Jesus. His mind seemed to be focusing on the world and on the relation that his followers should have towards the world. Now, when he said in his prayer, verse 18, as you, Father, have sent me into the world, so so I have sent them into the world. And when a little bit later, after the resurrection, in one version of the Great Commission, he said, go into all the world, he was not necessarily referring to far off places, although that is the impression that is given by some of the ancient missionary hymns like Far Far Away In Heathen Darkness, Pining Souls that are lost, etc. You know that hymn Far Far Away? That's where the world is, according to that missionary hymn. And the same myth is being perpetuated today in many Christian circles. When many people say the world, they think the Third World, or some people now call it the two thirds world because two thirds of the population of the world live in it. That is the blocks of Asia, Africa, Latin America in which the so called developing nations are to be found. These nations have been regarded for centuries as being the so called mission field, the world to which Western missionaries have gone and Western missions have sent their representatives. Now, one of the great new facts of the end of the 20th century is the internationalization of the Christian mission. And most of us need a Copernican revolution in our thinking about mission today. Let me give you one or two statistics. I don't know if you know this. During the 1980s, from which we only recently emerged third world missions, that is to say, missionaries sent from the third world to other parts of the world. Third world missions increased five times faster than missions from the Western world. By 1988, non Western missionaries represented about 30% the total Protestant missionary force. And if the present trends continue, by the year 2000 AD, nearly 55% of the worldwide Protestant missionaries will come not from the west, but from the Third World. It's a very remarkable situation. It means a real change in our thinking. So then, the word world in biblical thinking, especially in the writings of John, means the entire human community that does not honor God, irrespective of whether the community is near or far away. Makes no difference. It isn't the distance that matters. The world means ungodly secularism. It means any community that is not under the rule of the living God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. And in addition to that, this world, Jesus says in verse 14, is hostile to the people of God. The world hates the people of God. So this is the meaning of the world. Now let's understand that if that is the meaning of the world, although it includes people far, far away, it also includes our own country and our own city and our own neighborhood. It includes our office or hospital or shop or college or university where we may work. It includes our friends. It even includes our own family and our own home if they are not Christian. So we need a bigger vision of the world. We don't have to go to some far off place in order to be sent into the world. It may be that even living in our own home, among our friends and neighbors, we are already in the world, sent by Jesus Christ as his witnesses and his servants. So it's very important to correct our definition of the world so that when we hear the commission of Jesus, that is the Father, send me into the world, I send you. We're not necessarily thinking of cross cultural missionaries, important as they are, of course, but all of us. There isn't one Christian person today who is not included in that commission of Jesus sent into the world, whatever segment of that world it may be. Now, from that correct meaning of the Word, I want us to move on, if I may, to our correct attitude to this world. Because it's on this that Jesus focuses in his constant repetition of the Word and he seems to envisage three possible options that are before us. He rejects the first two as false attitudes to the world, and he advocates the third as the true and the proper and the correct Christian attitude to the world. So the first Christian option is isolation from the world. Now, Christian isolation from the world is perfectly understandable. Indeed, one has a great deal of sympathy for Christians who want to isolate or insulate themselves from the godless world. Christian people who are aware of the falsehood and the evil that prevail in the world and who are very anxious to remain the holy people that God has called them to be, have often considered escape from the world as the only possible tactic. The best way to remain uncontaminated by the world, they have argued, is to remain insulated from the world. Hence the whole monastic movement in every century of the Christian Church, not only in enclosed Catholic communities, but in our own evangelical ghettos as well. There are many, many Christians who are living this insulated, isolated, escapist kind of life. But let's be clear, friends. Jesus forbade it. It's quite clear in my text. Look at verse 15. My prayer is not that you should take them out of the world. I don't want them removed from the world. My prayer rather is that you will protect them from evil and it is implied while they remain in the evil world. So the longing of Jesus for his people is that we will live a holy life in the midst of the prevailing corruption. His will is not that we shall cultivate holiness by flight, by escape. Well, our Lord Jesus himself beautifully exemplified the very principle that he taught. He refused to remain in the sheltered seclusion and isolation of his heaven. He deliberately entered into our world. He penetrated deeply into human culture and into human experience. He never kept his distance. He was called, you remember, the friend of sinners, because he did befriend them and came close to them. And in this whole attitude to the world, Jesus was poles apart from the Pharisees. Why, the very word Pharisees mean separatists. They believed that they would be contaminated if they touched the world in any way. If a leprosy sufferer approached a Pharisee, he'd pick up stones to throw at him to keep his distance. And Jesus actually put out his hand and. And touched a leprosy sufferer. He touched untouchables. The prostitute approached a Pharisee, he'd gather his skirt around him and shrink in horror from contact with a woman like that. Not Jesus. When a prostitute approached him from behind, when he was reclining at a meal, she knelt at his feet, she wet them with her tears, she wiped them with her hair, she covered them with kisses. Jesus didn't shrink from her. He didn't shrink from anybody. I venture to give you a contemporary illustration, although I'm afraid it will be to the embarrassment of my good friend Bishop Bjorn Bue from Stavanger in Norway. I didn't ask his permission to tell this story. It was on a Friday evening in May 1986, and the service in the 12th century, the magnificent 12th century cathedral in Stavanger, was practically over. The last hymn had already been sung and the congregation were only waiting for the bishop to pronounce the benediction, when suddenly the silence was broken by a woman's shrill voice at the western door of the cathedral. She was probably only in her 30s, somewhat dishevelled. She began to walk up the center aisle of the cathedral, shouting at the top of her voice, and nobody made any attempt to restrain her. What is she saying? I said to the dean, said, who was standing beside me. She is saying, he whispered back, that at the beginning of the service the bishop had said that everybody was welcome, but she wondered if there was a welcome for her. But she was a prostitute, she said, and she had an illegitimate child and she was a drug addict as well, so could there be a welcome for her? She continued to walk up the aisle with her arms stretched out in eloquent appeal and a look of anguish on her face. Was there a welcome for her? She kept repeating. She was in the chancel now. She'd passed me, I was thankful to say I didn't know what I would have done. And she was walking towards the bishop. He didn't move. There was no look of disapproval on his face, only A gentle smile of compassion. She flung herself into his arms. And he did not reject her. He held her, he hugged her. He spoke to her of the Savior's forgiving love. That's it, friends. That's what we're called to, not insulation from the world. So that brings me to the second Christian possible Christian option. And that is assimilation to the world. This, of course, is the exact opposite to isolation from the world. And here are Christian people who are rightly concerned not to run away from the world. They are resolved to penetrate the world for Jesus Christ. But in the process of doing it, they lose their Christian distinctives. They assimilate the beliefs and the behavior, style and pattern of the world. They become indistinguishable from the world. And that has been another common mistake down the Christian centuries. But Jesus forbade that as well. We've already seen in verse 15 that he prayed that they might be protected from the evil. In other words, that they might not assimilate to the world. And 9, 16, he affirms that these followers of his are not of the world. That is to say, they do not belong to the world. And because they do not belong to the world, they do not behave like the world. They are holy. They are distinct. They are different from the world. And again, Jesus exemplified his own principle in. In his own life. Because although he fraternized freely with publicans and sinners, there is another verse in the New Testament that describes him as separate from sinners. He never adopted their views. He never adopted their lifestyle or their ways. He retained his perfect purity while remaining in close contact communication with them. Now, are you with me so far in these opposite options? We've looked at the two possible options that Jesus rejected. There are those so anxious not to be contaminated by the world that they escape from it. And there are those so anxious not to escape from it that they become contaminated by it. And those are the two common mistakes that all of us make. But Jesus calls us neither to an unworldly holiness nor to an unholy worldliness, but to what Dr. Alec Vidler called a holy worldliness, using worldliness not in the sense of assimilating to the ways of the world, but but as an opposite of other worldliness. Worldliness in this sense is involvement in the life of the world without becoming contaminated by it. So that brings us to the third Christian option, which I will call identification with the world. Because identification is not the same as assimilation. Assimilation is becoming like the world in its beliefs and in its behavior. And. But identification is entering into the world without compromising our Christian belief and behavior. It's identification without any loss of Christian identity. And once more, Jesus beautifully exemplified his own principle by means of the Incarnation. By the Incarnation he actually entered into our world as he also took our nature upon Him. But in becoming one of us, he did not cease to be Himself. And in becoming human, he did not cease to be divine. He remained fully himself while entering into our world. Now he says, as the Father sent, or as you, Father have sent me into the world, so I send them into the world so that he made his own mission the model of our mission, which means that all authentic Christian mission must be incarnational mission. It involves entering into other people's worlds. For some people it involves becoming a cross cultural missionary, soaking themselves in the culture and in the language and in the history and in and in the art of the country of their adoption. For other people it means developing a costly cross cultural friendship in their own city with some international person seeking to enter into that other person's world in order to bring the Good News to him or her. For others, it may be caring for the poor or the homeless or the unemployed in the city in which we live. For others it may mean struggling by the books we read and the films we see to understand the contemporary world, entering into it mentally, sympathetically, in order to share the Gospel with people like that. All these things and many more are examples of incarnational mission entering into people's worlds to reach them with the Good News. I've often quoted because I like very much the eloquent words spoken by Archbishop Michael Ramsey when defining what he understood to be the mission of the Church in a little book written in the 1960s, a critique of secular theology called Images Old and New. This is Archbishop Michael Ramsey. He said, we state and commend the faith only insofar as we go out and put ourselves with loving sympathy inside the doubts of the doubter, inside the questions of the questioner, and the loneliness of those who have lost the way. That's incarnational mission. Getting inside people and into their world. If only the Church could learn to do that. Well, let me recapitulate and conclude. Here are three options. Which is yours? Isolation, the way of escape. Assimilation, the way of compromise or identification, the way of mission. All three options are in my text. Verse 15. We are not to be taken out of the world. Escape. Verse 16. We don't belong to the world, so we mustn't go the way of compromise. But verse 18, we are sent into the world the way of mission, its commitment to mission, which will deliver us from these opposite mistakes of escape on the one hand and compromise on the other. It is escape and compromise that make the Christian mission impossible. If we're running away from the world, of course we can't engage in mission. We've got no contact with the world. If we assimilate to the world and compromise, of course we can't be involved in mission because our message is compromised. It's only mission itself that will deliver us from these two opposite mistakes. Now I want to conclude in this way Jesus words, as you, Father, sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world, are exceedingly moving. Because I think you will remember that many times in his public ministry, Jesus referred to the Father as He who sent me and to Himself as He whom the Father has sent, the sender and the sent one. Often he used that language. And that tells us that deep in the self consciousness of Jesus was the conviction that he had been sent into the world on his mission. Mission was an essential part of his identity. Now I venture to say that similarly it should be part of ours. We are not just people who have come to Jesus for salvation. We are also people who have been sent by Jesus on mission. Mission is an essential part of our identity. If we're Christian people, we should be able to refer to Jesus as He who sent us. And we should be able to refer to ourselves as those whom he has sent. And this should be profoundly part of our self consciousness of what we are, of what our identity is as Christian men and women. Now it's perfectly true that the modern mood, even in the churches, comes into direct collision with this idea of mission. There are many Christian leaders, a growing number of Christian or semi Christian leaders who are embracing what is called pluralism. And pluralism is not just the fact that there is a plurality of religions and of ethnic groups in the country. Pluralism is an ideology. Pluralism is a philosophy which affirms the independent validity of every religion. And those theologians who have become pluralists are now telling us that we have to give up our naive attempt to win the world for Christ. Oh, there can be no world mission, no world evangelization, they say now. No Christianity is okay for us. But then Buddhism and Islam and Judaism, etc. Are okay for them. Leave them alone. That's pluralism. Now we can have no truck with that. We refuse to go that way. However great the opposition becomes, however large the number of people, even Christian theologians and leaders and others, however large it may become of Those who are rejecting the Christian world mission, I hope we shall stand firm with Jesus Christ because ultimately there is only one reason and that is that he has said, as you send me into the world. Further, I've sent them into the world. So we got to choose who we listen to and whom we obey. Let's pray we'll spend a moment or two in silent response. As the Father has sent me into the world, sent Jesus, so I have sent you into the world. Is that sense ness, that sense of mission, a profound part of our identity and our self consciousness? It should be. Let's pray that it may be in silence. Lord Jesus, we desire to thank you together this morning that when the Father sent you into the world, you obeyed. And we want to pray together now that as you have sent and are sending us into the world, we may be given grace to obey. We pray that as a result of this world focused Sunday, all of us may be much more involved, though in different ways, in the worldwide Christian mission. Hear us. We humbly pray for the glory of your great name. Amen.
- [28:43]
A
You've been listening to John Stott. Listen to Faith of Our Fathers each Saturday and Sunday to hear more great 20th century preachers.