Transcript
Tim Keller (0:03)
Welcome to Gospel and Life. How comfortable are you when it comes to being open about your faith? This month on the podcast, Tim Keller looks at what the Bible says about having a public faith. He shows us what it looks like to be open about our faith in a pluralistic society in a way that creates civility and peace and meaningful dialogue with our neighbors.
Scripture Reader (0:30)
Tonight's scripture reading comes from Exodus 3:1 14. Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father in law, the priest of Midian. And he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There an angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that the bush was on fire and it did not burn up. So Moses thought, I will go over and see this strange sight why the bush does not burn up. When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush. Moses, Moses. And Moses said, here I am. Do not come any closer. God said, take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. Then he said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. At this, Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God. The Lord said, I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey, the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. But Moses said to God, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? And God said, I will be with you, and this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain. Moses said to God, suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you. And they ask me, what is his name? Then what shall I tell them? God said to Moses, I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites, I am has sent me to you the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Discussion Host (2:50)
Now, each week we're looking at the subject of how we can talk about our deepest faith beliefs in public. How can we share who we are, our deep faith beliefs, but in such a way that's respectful, it promotes peace. And I have observed over the years that one of the best ways of having a discussion about faith publicly is to not simply talk about what you believe, but also how you came to believe it. Not just do the content, but the process or the journey that you went on. It's not just here's what I believe, but how did you come to believe what you believe? How did you come to have faith in the God you have faith in? It's a journey account, or some people would call it a personal testimony. And I think it lowers the temperature. Because when you're not just saying, here's what I believe. No, here's what I believe, you're talking about the process and the experience by which you came to your faith. I think it commands a certain respect. You know, you listen to a person's account of their experience. I think it also very often is helpful because everybody's on a process and to hear how you went through your process is helpful. And so in order to help us think about how we can think about this is we're looking at this passage which is very famous. Moses and the burning bush. There's an awful. Leo and I were up here just talking about. Maybe some of you aren't for the generation, but it's hard for me not to think of Charlton Heston and Cecil B. DeMille's voice or whoever's voice coming from the burning bush. I mean, it's a very famous. That was the movie Ten Commandments. Some of you movies, you used to go and watch them on big screens and things like that. I know it's. Sorry, it's kind of ancient history, but it's actually this account is here, and we're looking at it tonight because it's Moses conversion experience. This is Moses conversion experience. This is how he didn't just come to believe in God, he already believed in God. In fact, when God speaks to him, he says, look, I'm the God of your father and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When he says that, he's saying, I'm the God you believe in. Actually, I'm the God of your father, the God of your father. He knows that he, Moses, believes in this God, but he's never encountered him. He's never had A face to face experience with him. He hasn't met him. And therefore it can be said that this is Moses conversion experience. And so if we see how he didn't come just to believe in God, but actually meet God, we're going to see four things that brought him to that. And I think they're the same four things that the Bible says you have to have usually happen in your life if you're going to meet him as well. So if Moses met him this way, we need these four things usually in order to actually experience and meet God. What are those four things? They are a disrupting site, an expanding concept, a personal problem, and a surprising grace. Okay, so first, a disrupting sight. The first thing that brings Moses to actually meet God is the bush itself. Verse 2 and 3. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire, it did not burn up. So Moses thought, I will go over and see this strange sight. Why the bush is not consumed, does not burn up. Now, Moses probably originally saw a brush fire over here, some distance, but that wasn't all that unusual. There's a lot of reasons why you can have brush fires in the desert. But what caught his attention was this fire didn't go out. And as you can imagine, brush fires are fast. Why? Because there's no fuel out there. A bush or some brush isn't much in the way of fuel. So fires that do happen out there because of lightning or for other whatever reason, or maybe some other shepherd who went by and left a campfire going, if you are going to have a. A brush fire, it goes out quickly. But evidently this bush kept burning and burning and burning and burning. And we're told that Moses decided, I better go see what this is. Why? Because that doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit. That's impossible. A bush has to burn out. I mean, the fire, you know, consumes the bush and then it goes out. Why does the bush continue to burn? Why does the fire continue to burn? And we're told he. He went over. See, twice it uses this word, I will go over and see this strange sight. Verse 4. It says, the Lord saw he had gone over. That is a Hebrew word that means to detour. He let himself be interrupted. His normal path was interrupted. Okay, what's the first principle? Here's the first principle. Ordinarily you don't meet God unless something comes into your life that you can't account for and disrupts your life or disrupts your thinking. Very often, something seriously disrupts and interrupts you. What Moses saw The burning bush didn't fit his understanding of what could happen because it didn't fit. He went over to see it and figure it out and consider it and so forth. And we usually do not come to faith in God just simply by thinking about it. We usually have to have something that comes into our life that disrupts us, that we can't account for and that makes us think in ways we didn't before. Thomas Kuhn wrote a book in the mid 20th century called the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Who explains this? It's an academic book that you probably have not heard of and yet you have, probably because it was very famous, at least maybe not by name. Kuhn was writing about how science works, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn tried. He was a philosopher of science, historian of science, and he said, actually, science does not move forward the way you tend to say. Scientists like to say I am objective and when I get a new bit of data, I look at it and if it, I follow the evidence wherever it leads. And so I'm gradually making small changes. I'm getting more evidence, I'm getting clear view and I'm changing my views in accord with the evidence. And Kuhn says, no, that's not how it works. Kuhn says we are very close minded, all of us. We are not open to new evidence. And he says all of us tend to have interpretive grids by which we interpret reality. Now a grid is what he called a paradigm. So yes, actually he, I think popularized the term paradigm. A paradigm is a way of looking at reality. And Kuhn says we really have those views, these interpretive grids, these ways of looking at reality. And when new evidence comes along, we do everything we can to use that evidence to confirm what we already believe. We do everything we can to work it in. Now, Bob, I'll tell you one of the perfect, to me examples of that was 9, 11. Here we all are all looking at the same horrible thing that happened. We're looking right at it. There it is. But there were some people who had an interpretive grid that said America is the bad guys in the world. America is. We're the bad guys. We're a force for materialism and, you know, abuse of power, whatever. We're the bad guys in the world. And there was another other people who said, America is the good guy. We're the force of good on the side of good against evil. So, you know, one says America's a good guy, one says America's a bad guy. It's amazing. I Read the essays of people after 9, 11. We were looking at the very same thing and everybody used it to say, see, this is what I always said, this is what I always believed. See 9, 11. That proves that we're the bad guy. The world hates us. C9, 11. Other people said that proves that we're the good people and we have evil against us. Here we had two different groups of people with two different paradigms. They were totally opposite to each other, looking at the same bit of data and using it to support the paradigm. This is exactly what Thomas Kuhn says. We're not open minded people. We have our set of beliefs and when a piece of data comes, we use it to confirm what we already believe. Except Kuhn says sometimes stuff comes into our lives that disrupts. Sometimes stuff comes into our, into our lives that we can't really account for in the grid, doesn't really fit. It's difficult to work it. In Kuhn's example, of course, the classic example was our Western understanding of the solar system. Kuhn says for years people believed that the Earth was fixed and the Earth was in the center and there were all these other bodies orbiting around it. And of course that seemed to explain. You looked up in the sky and you could see, you could see other bodies moving. And we said, of course they're all orbiting around us. And so every time you got a new bit of data, we found a new planet, we found another, you know, the astronomers found another heavenly body. They said, of course that fits into the grid. And then Kuhn says, what began to happen was some of the bodies that we saw in space didn't seem to fit their movements didn't seem to work into this idea that everything was orbiting around Earth. Some of them kind of moved, evidently, like zigzags in the sky. And that didn't seem to really work. And Kuhn says what happens eventually is enough data comes in you can't account for, or something comes in you can't account for and it leads you to question the grid itself. And you sit there and say, well, maybe I got it all wrong. And you try on, it's like trying on a dress, you try on a new paradigm, you try something else on and you say, well, maybe the Earth is orbiting too. And when you try that paradigm on, suddenly it makes sense of all the data and you have what he calls a paradigm shift. It's like a conversion. Suddenly you realize if I change the grid, then suddenly I can explain everything else and you have this enormous shift. So he says, basically, because we're so close minded, we do not move our. We don't change our beliefs little by little. Instead we try to work everything in to confirm our existing paradigms until something comes in, a burning bush, something that doesn't fit, something you can't account for. You try on a new way of thinking and it creates a shift, basically a kind of conversion. Now that's how it is with God. Usually. Usually something comes into your life, it's a burning bush and you can't account for it. You got a set of beliefs. Either you don't believe in God or you believe. Well, there probably is a God, but nobody knows. You either have an inconsequential God or you have no God or something like that. A God that you don't need to know in order to live life. And then something comes into your life and you can't account for. Could be a train of thought. We've talked about this for the last couple of weeks. You know, W.H. auden, who lived here in the Upper east side In World War II, great British poet, didn't believe in God. But World War II came, we talked about this at length, last couple weeks, World War II comes along. W.H. auden sees the Nazis, what they're doing, and he says, wait a minute, if there's no God, what right do I have to say that my values are right and there's a wrong. If there's no God, what warrant do I have for saying I'm right and they're wrong? And so he's thought like this. If there's no God, all morality is relative. But no, morality is not relative. What they're doing is wrong, and therefore there must be a God. See, a train of thought came along that didn't fit in to his grid. And he had a paradigm shift. He had to change it. He questioned the grid itself. So it can be kind of an intellectual burning bush, a train of thought. But very often it's something else. Years ago, when Redeemer got started and we had a few hundred people, you know, actually in the early days, I mean, the first couple years, this body was about the size of Redeemer, the whole of Redeemer. And we were, this is the late 80s, early 90s, and we were just normal New Yorkers. We were people who worked on Wall street, worked in the arts, you know, worked in fashion, just normal New Yorkers. But I used to find that if you brought a person in the average Manhattanite, 99.9% of the average Manhattanites didn't believe in historic Christianity, you know, or anything like that. But if they came in and they just sat down and they realized we all believed in historic Christianity, they were here for about 10 or 15 minutes, they started having paradigm shifts. Redeemer itself was a burning bush. You know why? Because in their grid, people like them, people who'd gone to the same schools, people who did the same jobs, people like them didn't believe in Christianity. See, it was just not done. Nobody did it, except here's a few hundred people that were doing it. And so what are we going to do about that? And suddenly Redeemer itself sometimes was a burning bush. You could just see little paradigm meltdowns, you know, was coming out of their ears and say, the paradigm, the old paradigm, there was a shift going on. They couldn't quite account for people that were, you know, we weren't brilliant, we're just normal. And normal people don't have these beliefs. How could you believe that? Or sometimes a Christian comes into your life and maybe you're not a believer and the Christian is just so much more wise or so much more poised or so much more intelligent and so much more thoughtful than you thought Christians could be. And they, and the Christian itself is like a burning bush or very often one more thing before going on, very often disillusioning and difficult experiences. Very often they're the burning bush. They come into your life and you're saying, look, I'm. I don't know if there's a God. There might be, there might not. I don't need to know God. That's your grid, which means your assumption is I can handle life. I can handle life. You know, I'm smart, I'm savvy. You know, I've got, I got a therapist, you know, I got friends, you know, I'm not stupid, you know, I know life isn't easy, but I can handle life. David Martyn Lloyd Jones was a physician, a young physician in Britain in the 1920s. He became a Christian. He got converted and went into the ministry after that. But he tells about his conversion and a big part of it was this. He believed. Well, a big part of it was this a man that he admired, an older man who was a physician in everything he wanted to be. See, in that day and time, the best physicians in Britain, they were heroes, they were emulated, they were, you know, they were saving lives, they were respected, they were brilliant, they were, they were well paid, they had enormous status. And it was one of those men that Lloyd Jones looked up to and wanted to be like. And he was dating a woman and she died. Great tragedy. He came by to see Lloyd Jones and he says, hey, it'd be okay if I stayed here for a little bit. And Lloyd Jones says, oh, jerk. Set up to the fire. And the man, Lloyd Jones says, a man pulled up a chair to the fire and sat down and stared into the fire for two hours. Didn't say a word, Almost didn't act as if Lloyd Jones was there. Now, Lloyd Jones did not have his feelings hurt and he didn't feel in any way that that was inappropriate. It was perfectly appropriate. But when he saw one of the men that he. A world beater, a person that he thought that he wanted to be like, and he realized this man was absolutely out of resources. He had nothing left. He had nothing with which to actually face the normal realities of life. And Lloyd Jones says he looked at him staring at the fire and this is what he said. He says, I suddenly saw the vanity of all human greatness. I suddenly saw the vanity of all human greatness. What was going on there in that young man's mind? It was a burning bush. It was something that didn't. He says, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. If a guy like this can't handle life, how in the world do I think I can handle life without God? So, but here's the point. When these things come into your life and they start to challenge you and they start to make you question the grid, are you willing to go over like Moses? You know, if Moses hadn't gone over, if he actually said, I don't want to be bothered, he would have never heard of Moses. See, once you get bothered, you have to be willing to think it out. You have to have the guts to think it out and be willing to think it out.