[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: How's it going?
[SPEAKER_00]: My name is Tim.
[SPEAKER_00]: For those of you who don't know me, I'm the senior minister here at one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, we are in our final week of our questioning Christianity series.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope it's been helpful, maybe you've left, or you're coming out of this series with more questions than you started with.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: As Tara mentioned, did she do a great job hosting tonight?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's well done, Tara.
[SPEAKER_00]: There you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: hosting is actually I find hosting more difficult than preaching so really a job Tara thank you so much So yes next week I'll be hosting some Q&A so if you've got questions send them in we will do a few live not many though Most of the ones we're going to be tackling are sort of a composite of a bunch of questions that have already been sent in Sort of average them out.
[SPEAKER_00]: You might say put the the similar ones together and so I'll be addressing a bunch of those It's going to be heaps of fun next week
[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry, the week after that, we're starting a new series in the book of Romans, but not the whole book.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're just going to look at chapter 8, so the central chapter of Romans, so the really the best chapter in the best of Paul's letters.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think Romans 8 is one of the richest meals that you can consume in the Scriptures, and we're going to dig into that for a few weeks together.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to be fantastic.
[SPEAKER_00]: But tonight, as we start our questioning Christianity series week seven, we are talking about hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I could get the slides on the screen, excellent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's been a bit of a journey.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've covered a lot of topics tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're talking about hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as the Oxford Professor John Lennox put it pretty succinctly in a lecture of his I heard recently, that hope is simply your expectation of the future.
[SPEAKER_00]: So hope is very simply what you expect awaits you in the future.
[SPEAKER_00]: The psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Franco wrote about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp in a book called Man Search for Meaning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of you may have read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he observed that hope was often the difference between life and death for the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he wrote that any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was soon lost.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he said that those who lost hope developed a kind of certain look in their eye are fatalism that inevitably led them toward death because they simply gave up, they stopped fighting.
[SPEAKER_00]: They experienced what he called a kind of existential vacuum that swallowed them, a complete loss of meaning, a sense that nothing really mattered, and so they gave up.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he said, those who felt that they had something to live for, something to look forward to, beyond the immediate experience of life in the Nazi death camps, were able to survive, and sometimes even to thrive, despite the immense difficulty of their circumstances.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he wrote that a man who was conscious,
[SPEAKER_00]: of the responsibility he bears toward another human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work that he must complete.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll never be able to throw away his life.
[SPEAKER_00]: If he knows the why for his existence, he'll be able to bear almost any how.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that line.
[SPEAKER_00]: If he knows the why for his existence or their existence, they can face almost any how,
[SPEAKER_00]: at the moment that it finds meaning, and life is never made unbearable by our circumstances, but only by a lack of meaning and purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now to illustrate this,
[SPEAKER_00]: He describes how those in the camps who really had lost everything, perhaps all of their family members had been killed, or there wasn't really anything that they had devoted their lives to that was waiting for them outside the concentration camps, some great work that they were involved in, and there was no faith in God.
[SPEAKER_00]: If all of those things had been lost, basically when there was nothing left, if they weren't killed by the Nazis, they just wasted away.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they would get succumb to illness and then they would die.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Frankl's clear observation was that human beings, this is really the heart of his book, human beings cannot live without hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need hope to survive.
[SPEAKER_00]: And on a broader cultural point, we've touched on this a bunch of times through this series, you don't have to scratch too deep beneath the surface what's going on in our culture right now to work out that meaning and hope is very much in short supply in our culture at the moment, in the west at the moment, from growing fears about war, the rise of totalitarian states,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the challenges of mass migration, the fear of unfolding a climate catastrophe.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, maybe another global pandemic, you know, you hear this on the news, every, every so often some new thing is brewing somewhere and we all freak out and try to pretend like we didn't just hear that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Terrorism, economic fears, job security and the rise of AI, the sense of injustice that wealth has been concentrated in the hands of so few.
[SPEAKER_00]: I read recently that in America the top 2.5 percent.
[SPEAKER_00]: have more wealth than the bottom 50%.
[SPEAKER_00]: The top 2.5% of the country have more wealth than the bottom 50%.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think you cannot run a functional society with that kind of disparity in income, in wealth disparity.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, difficulty finding a life partner.
[SPEAKER_00]: particularly on dating apps, tanking birth rates, and the challenge of just finding affordable housing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So millennials and younger lots of people are reporting this millennials and younger other first generations in the Western world the last 150 years who expected their future will be much worse than that of their parents and their grandparents, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You guys are in that generation.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a sense that what awaits you in the future will be worse than what your parents had.
[SPEAKER_00]: And therefore, why hope, what's there to look forward to?
[SPEAKER_00]: And in many cases, people probably aren't wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: So hope is in short supply.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can see how this is playing out.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's morphing into despair.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was reading in New York Times article just this weekend about the disappearing generation of young men who feel lost and left behind.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, we celebrate the progress that women have made over the last 60 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: But young men generally have not kept up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the stats are pretty confronting, rates of school and college dropouts, poor job prospects, lack of direction, growing suicide rates, mental health getting lost in endless dopamine hits of doom-scrolling, online gaming, online pornography.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a generation of boys that just have no hope that they're kind of giving up, they're dropping out, they're not even bothering to try.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course all those things impact on women as well, but for one thing women are finding it harder and harder to meet men who to put it bluntly are as accomplished and educated as they are.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's hard to find someone that you feel can be an equal life partner.
[SPEAKER_00]: And thankfully, we have some amazing young men in this church.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thank God for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this is a cultural wide phenomenon.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's widespread despair on a number of fronts.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're seeing people turn in what's filling that void.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we spoke about this last week, as well, is that people are turning or being radicalized by political and sociological ideologies.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll both are left in the right.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not saying they're all swinging left or all going right.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's happening in both directions.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have progressive and ultra conservative movements that are radicalizing people and the concern is that it could lead to political violence.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're already seeing some of that stirring.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what we're noticing is that the despair is morphing into resentment and therefore into anger.
[SPEAKER_00]: People are angry.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, much of this stems from the fact that their expectation of the future as John Lennox put it feels hope less.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the question is not whether we need hope, we all need hope, but what kind of hope do we need that will actually sustain us with courage and with love and endurance in a world that feels like all of these things are getting worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe they're not getting worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something feels like it, but maybe it's actually no worse than it's ever been, but the problem is that we don't have the kinds of resources now in the West psychologically, spiritually, socially, culturally, that our previous generations have had to face the challenges of our time with courage and with commitment and with self-sacrifice and with patient and hopeful endurance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every generation has challenges that it has to face, has obstacles that has to overcome, but perhaps it feels worse now because we don't have a bedrock of resources, a foundation to stand on that gives us the ability to face these things in a way that is fruitful and helpful.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, see, if you're going to make the kinds of personal sacrifices necessary to contribute to a better future for your loved ones or your nation or whatever, that you believe will make a difference for your loved ones to thrive after your gone, then you need something deeper than simply personal fulfillment and personal freedom as the bedrock of your hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: as your source of meaning.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to be something greater than what I feel like I can get out of this life, what's good for me, what makes me self-actualised and experienced degraded degrees of freedom.
[SPEAKER_00]: I need to put those things aside to say what will actually benefit other people, like we were just singing about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lord, in your love, lead me to those who are around me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's at the heart of the Christian faith, but that requires faith in order to make those kinds of sacrifices.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what we're going to look at today is why Christianity, I believe, rather than secularism, secularism, what is I can't speak tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Uniquely supplies a hope that explains our present sense of meaninglessness, outperforms the story of secular progress that we're surrounded with, and I think answers our deepest fears, especially in terms of suffering and death, giving us assurance and courage,
[SPEAKER_00]: So, first of all, what I want to say is that hope is unavoidable and it's determinative.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, as Victor Frank will said, you need hope, it's unavoidable, but you also need a hope that is more powerful than simply wishful thinking.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need something that is greater than just, well, I hope there'll be a silver lining to that very dark cloud that's on the horizon.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need a hope that isn't just ethereal, maybe it will work out, maybe one day we'll see some change, you need a hope that is actually concrete and specific.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need a hope in something that is concrete and specific.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tim Keller has an excellent illustration of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine you have two women of the same age, the same socioeconomic status, the same educational level, and even the same temperament, and you hire both of them and say to each one, you're part of an assembly line, and I want you to put part A into part B, and then hand over what you've assembled to somebody else, and I want you to do that over and over again for eight hours a day.
[SPEAKER_00]: You put them in identical rooms with identical lighting, identical temperature and ventilation.
[SPEAKER_00]: You give them the same number of breaks.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is boring tedious work.
[SPEAKER_00]: The conditions are the same in every way, except for one difference.
[SPEAKER_00]: You tell the first woman that at the end of the year, you'll pay her $30,000 for the work she's done.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you tell the second woman that at the end of the year, you're going to pay her $30 million.
[SPEAKER_00]: After a couple of weeks, the first woman will be saying, this is terrible.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is driving me insane to her partner, she might say, I'll be thinking about quitting this horrible work.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the second woman will say, no, this is perfectly acceptable.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love this.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I whistle while I work, I am genuinely excited to come to work and put part A into part B and hand it over to that person right there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what's going on?
[SPEAKER_00]: You have two human beings who are experiencing identical circumstances, but in radically different ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: What makes a difference?
[SPEAKER_00]: It is their expectation of the future.
[SPEAKER_00]: What awaits them in the future?
[SPEAKER_00]: One has no hope for anything much.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other has infinitely more hope, a much greater sense of what the future holds.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm not saying, I don't think Tim Keller is saying in this illustration, that all we need to be happy is a really good income.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, that's not the point of this, but what he says, I quote here, it does, however, show that what we believe about our future controls how we experience our present.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we believe about the future controls how we experience our present.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are irreduciably hope-based creatures.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we need, however, is not just a general hopefulness.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, there are scientific studies that show that a sunny disposition and an optimistic personality do not necessarily produce a better life.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of hope we need is something much deeper, much more specific and much more concrete, something real that you can look forward to.
[SPEAKER_00]: In his book, The Real American Dream, a meditation on Hope, the author Andrew Del Banco says that in order to have hope, human beings need to be able to locate their lives in a larger story
[SPEAKER_00]: that gives their life meaning.
[SPEAKER_00]: They need to be able to locate their lives in a larger story that gives their specific life meaning.
[SPEAKER_00]: We cannot, he says, bear life by living only in the present, facing one disconnected event after another day after day pursuing only instant gratification without any reference to an end point.
[SPEAKER_00]: because we're future-oriented beings, so we cannot live without at least some sense, some belief that our life is building toward a purposeful end, that it has meaning, that our lives meant something, or will mean something more than just simply we marked time and that we existed and we were known by a few people and we did some stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our lives, we need to know that our lives mean something more than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he writes, we must imagine some end-to-life that transcends our own tiny allotment of days and hours, if we'd have keep it bay, that dim back of the mind suspicion that we are adrift in an absurd and pointless universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, the book is written with an American audience in mind, but I think what he says speaks to the whole of the Western world, the whole of the secular Western culture, that has emerged over the last 150 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what he says, and we've talked about this over the previous weeks, is that prior to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution,
[SPEAKER_00]: sort of at the end of the 19th century, hope was chiefly expressed through the Christian story.
[SPEAKER_00]: So most people had a working knowledge of the Christian story, a working knowledge of the gospel, and they framed their lives in the light of that story.
[SPEAKER_00]: They said, this is what gives my life meaning, this is how I understand what my life means, of what the world means, and what I do, and where I'm headed, what it all means.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was chiefly expressed to the Christian story that gave meaning to both suffering
[SPEAKER_00]: and the promise of deliverance through death.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, but then under the Enlightenment or through the Enlightenment with influence, like thinkers like Marx and Freud and Darwin and Nietzsche, belief in God and belief in the supernatural began to weaken and instead of finding ultimate hope in the Christian idea of the coming kingdom of God and the rule and reign of Jesus over all things that would bring peace and healing to all of creation.
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened was, what these guys did, what Freud and Marx
[SPEAKER_00]: and Nietzsche and others did, is that they actually co-opted the Christian story, they took the Christian story and they secularized it, they transformed it, they kind of morphed it into something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what they said was, we have hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a sense of the, you know, the meaning of history, in fact, Marx coined the term, the end of history, he believed that through scientific progress, economic policy, social policy, the right kind of government, the right kind of scientific advancements, the right sort of ordering of society, we will achieve utopia on Earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: We will bring in, we'll usher in.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are his words.
[SPEAKER_00]: The end of history, there will no longer be any striving towards something better because we'll have created it for ourselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what he believed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so through scientific and technological process, education, social economic policy, we are going to create utopia on earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to bring in the kingdom of God, but we're going to do it ourselves on our own terms.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the idea of history moving toward a day of judgment, ultimate justice, the establishment of God's rule and reign over all things at the time of Christ's return had been rejected and retold as the story of human progress,
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've talked about that these last couple of weeks.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they said, we don't need God anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're no longer need God, because we have the scientific ability.
[SPEAKER_00]: And finally, we're unleashing the kind of industrial power that can create our own future, that can solve our own problems.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't need God to help us now.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can do it just to find on our own.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can remember talking about data about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: He grew up in the 40s and 50s, and there was still a little bit of this left over in the Western world.
[SPEAKER_00]: After the Second World War, there was a feeling that from the ashes of the war, we're going to rebuild a better future.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can go through science, technology, and all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to solve the world's problems through.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to figure out how to get rid of illness through medicine.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've made so many advancements in medicine.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to deal with all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to education.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to create international cooperation through the United Nations.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's going to be peace on Earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: How's that going for us right now?
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to make our lives much more prosperous, much more comfortable, much healthier.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to live longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to have these beautiful cities.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to be utopia.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of that they felt was just over the horizon.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the Vietnam War happened, or first of the Korean War, then the Vietnam War.
[SPEAKER_00]: And interestingly, in the Vietnam War, the first war that was ever televised, people actually saw for themselves the horrors of war in real time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that utopian vision evaporated, especially when they heard about things like Napam and Agent Orange.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what Western soldiers were doing to Vietnamese villages.
[SPEAKER_00]: And people just went, this is not the future we
[SPEAKER_00]: So that horizon now feels pretty far away, especially given that it became clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: It kind of after the Second World War, after Vietnam War, as Dominic Sandbrook, who's a historian, he has a podcast called The Rest of History.
[SPEAKER_00]: Does anyone listen to The Rest of History here?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, all right, got some homies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to listen to the rest of history if you haven't checked it out.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he put it recently in an interview that history's greatest killers, history's greatest killers, have always been utopian idealists.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were people who believed in a better world and who sought the power to make it happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've seen this more clearly in the 20th century than at any other point in history.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm still quoting in here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hitler was an idealist, Stalin was an idealist, Mao was an idealist, Paul Pot was an idealist.
[SPEAKER_00]: They think they're making a better world.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as you know, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in an interview about the Handmaid's tale, Margaret Atwood said that the real enemy of the book is not religion.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not an anti-religious book, she says.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not an anti-male book.
[SPEAKER_00]: The real enemy that she has inside in that book is utopian idealism because the people who are the oppressors who run the regimes think they're doing the right thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They believe in what they're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that makes them incredibly dangerous.
[SPEAKER_00]: And someone asked me after last week why I'm so against Christian nationalism.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's for the exact same reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because even though we have a Christian vision behind it, a utopian idealist vision that we think we can realize through making the government Christian and enforcing that on the culture, it may start out well, but I could guarantee you, and we've seen this time and time again throughout history, at some point it will turn oppressive and violent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because not everyone wants to be a Christian, and not everyone wants to do what the people in charge say that they're supposed to do, and if you're going to make them do it, then you have to force them if they won't do it willingly.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see how that works?
[SPEAKER_00]: We've seen that over and over again through history.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whenever the church gets in power when any kind of religion or any kind of political ideology, which is really just religions in a different form, when they get total power, they almost always cause massive devastation.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the problem is they don't stop because they think they're doing the right thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They believe in their vision of the future.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm against Christian nationalism for all of those reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now it's not to say that I don't think we should have strong Christian foundations for our country, of course I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's very different from saying, therefore we should enshrine Christianity as the only appropriate way to govern the country.
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that make sense?
[SPEAKER_00]: Lots of more to talk about there I know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the light of all those failed utopian visions, one of the things that Tim Keller says is that 150 years ago, deep Christian hope rooted in the story of scripture began to morph.
[SPEAKER_00]: into rational scientific optimism about human potential and human progress which has in the light of the last few decades collapsed into a kind of deep despair.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hoping optimism, friends, are not the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've said all through this series that Christians are not optimistic people.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are not optimists as Christians, but we are hopeful.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a very different thing, we're not optimists, we don't believe that necessarily the future looks better than it is today.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, in many ways our scriptures tell us that it may not look much better and might look much worse as we move forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're not optimistic, but we do have hope because we know where the story ultimately ends.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have incredible hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's what that's the foundation of Christian hope is that we have a belief, not in what we can create on earth, but what we think God will ultimately do at the real end of history, which we are always looking toward and striving for and putting our trust in.
[SPEAKER_00]: we're going to talk some more about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the key things that I think has happened as our secular optimism in progress has failed us is we've substituted our optimism for what might happen in the culture into something that we have enshrined within ourselves and we've also talked about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's happened is we've then said okay I can't
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure I could deal with what's going on out there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm rejecting all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what I can do is look inside myself, find out who I truly am and express that into the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Live my truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Find out what it means to be me and then express that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Reject things that come to me from the outside, external tradition, religion, family, whatever else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look inside, find my true meaning, find my true self.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then essentially worship that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is, with the loss of hope in the Christian story and the idolization of the self, you know, self-actualization without reference to God or anything else, there is one thing that you can't avoid even with that vision, there's one thing that you cannot run away from.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the problem with the secular idealization of the self is that the story, that story, can't eradicate the one immovable fact of life, which is that one day we are all going to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I would say death and taxes, but the richest people in the world have figured out how to avoid paying taxes, so we're just left with death.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, with a much stronger foundation for hope, salvation, the hope of heaven, even kind of something like patriotic sacrifice, duty for the good of the nation or your people, you could kind of make sense of, um, a worthy death.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it inspired self-sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_00]: People were willing to lay down their lives for a greater cause that they believed in.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't think we have much of that left in Western culture because self-fulfillment can't get you there.
[SPEAKER_00]: doesn't get you there, like you're not going to say I'm going to lay down my life for a greater good if the greater good that you're living for as yourself, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That makes sense?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the ultimate emptiness that is death because in death, in the modern understanding of it anyway, death is the loss of self, it's the end of self.
[SPEAKER_00]: that's where you finish, that's where your story ends.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you work as hard as you possibly can to sustain your life and maintain your life and live a life of wellness in the hope that maybe like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's his name, Brian Johnson, that guy who's trying to cheat death, injecting himself with his own son's blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: whatever, it's weird.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's weird.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole thing is weird.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you look at him, he actually looks kind of dead in my opinion, it's pale and sort of zombie-like.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he's Brian Johnson check about, he's investing millions and millions and millions of dollars in trying to keep himself alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: All this technology that's going into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because he's terrified of death, absolutely terrified that when he comes to the end of his life, that will be the end of his story.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, of course, one of the most common secular responses to this, you know, rather than seeing death as a terror that has to be overcome, you know, with some kind of religious hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: What many people will say is that, you know, there's nothing to fear about death.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a natural part of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's just a natural part of living in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Death is just another phase of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, you know, you, you, you sort of, you die and you go back into nature, it's, it's the circle of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Lion King, come on, the circle of life, you all want to sing it now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyone game, though, um, you know, in the circle of life, in the Lion King, death isn't death.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the end of that, your story.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just life continuing, but in a different form.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you, you, you die, you get buried, you turn into grass, you get eaten by the antelope.
[SPEAKER_00]: then you get, you know, pooped out somewhere else, and you fertilize another part of God's creation.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is how people try to frame it, and I went to a funeral recently where it was not, not a religious funeral, and it was very weird, because there was no discussion of what all of this person's life might mean.
[SPEAKER_00]: what kind of what story it told, what part of a greater story it might have been part of, what we simply got tragically was really just a rehearsal of their resume.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's the life they lived and now it's over.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was, that was terrifying.
[SPEAKER_00]: I left feeling deeply troubled.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the question is, what is life then, what is this new form of life after death, if it actually involves no consciousness and no love?
[SPEAKER_00]: If nothing of ourselves actually continues on, even if ourselves do in some way, but even in Eastern religions, you know, if you, when you die, you kind of go and join the all-sol or Nirvana, or something like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's not really you that continues on.
[SPEAKER_00]: You get absorbed into something else, and your personality, your sense of self, the you that is you, and the me that's me disappears.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's no sense of love or relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just kind of absorbed into a greater ether, whatever that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think when people really contemplate this, our hearts rebelled deeply at this idea, even if we can come to peace with the idea that life after death or whatever it is is just kind of a non-existence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just enter the void, we cease to exist or we become food for plants.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that we cannot shake as human beings, no matter how hard we try is the feeling that death
[SPEAKER_00]: that it no matter what form it takes, it's still a tragedy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's still an interruption.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's still something that shouldn't really happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we feel in a kind of an a deep, deep part of us, that even if someone has lived a full life, that there's
[SPEAKER_00]: that really, this can't really be it, surely.
[SPEAKER_00]: That can't be the end of that person's story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And people will comfort themselves and say, well, their life, their story will continue on in their children, and their grandchildren, what have you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe that's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: But even so, the very reason that we feel that we need to justify it, that it doesn't just feel like a natural part of living, we know in our heart of hearts that it's deeply, deeply wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why is it so wrong?
[SPEAKER_00]: What does it feel so wrong?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's because it is the end of love and it's the end of relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the end of love and it's the end of relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: How can someone that we have loved so deeply that meant so much to us that brought us such deep joy, so much of our own meaning as a person was wrapped up in their life?
[SPEAKER_00]: How can they simply cease to exist when they die?
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels so alien, it's a violation, and it takes people years often.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes they never do, get over the grief.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how deeply it troubles us and affects us.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we're able to just say, or this is just a natural part of life, then we wouldn't be so massively grieved when someone that we love dies.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'd be able to kind of frame it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The psychologist Carl Jung once wrote,
[SPEAKER_00]: that death is indeed a fearful piece of brutality.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no sense pretending otherwise.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is brutal not only as a physical event, but far more so psychically.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our human being is torn away from us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what remains is the icy stillness of death.
[SPEAKER_00]: The no longer exists any hope of a relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: For all the bridges have been smashed with one blow.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a div that's confronting statement, but it makes sense from a Christian point of view, from a Christian perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because as Christians, we say that God is love, that God isn't, that love is not just one of his attributes, we say that God is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And therefore, what we have been made to experience, the very meaning of our existence, I would argue, is to know God's love and love Him in return and to experience love from others and to love them in return.
[SPEAKER_00]: The meaning of our existence is embedded in love and in deep relationship with one another, with God and with others.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why they're the two great commandments, because if you can live into those two things perfectly, you will experience perfect happiness, but of course none of us can, so we don't experience perfect happiness, and that's part of the result of that is because of sin.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the point I'm making here is that we exist to love and we exist to be in relationship and death is the interruption of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It kills it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It smashes it to pieces in one blow, or at least it feels like it does.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if death destroys love, and if death destroys the possibility of relationship on going relationship with those we've loved, that's why Paul says in one Corinthians 15 that as far as God's concern, death is the ultimate enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the reason Jesus came to defeat that ultimate enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason Christ came was not just to die to forgive us from our sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's part of what He came to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: The heart of what He came to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: The very reason He came, the central point of it, was that Jesus died to destroy death, to defeat our ultimate enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because didn't God say in the beginning, the wages of sin is,
[SPEAKER_00]: death.
[SPEAKER_00]: The consequence of this rebellion will be something that you were not meant to experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when Jesus came into this world as Christians, we would say the reason he came was to destroy that enemy, to destroy death forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why in Revelation chapter 1, when John sees a vision of the resurrected Jesus,
[SPEAKER_00]: What does Jesus say to John?
[SPEAKER_00]: Behold, I've forgiven everyone's sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, he says, behold, I now hold the keys to death.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've taken them back.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've defeated the enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I now have that power.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's obviously something that we're looking forward to the fulfillment of that vision at the end of all things.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's a hope that we live into now that the death is a defeated enemy, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So Jesus was crucified for the forgiveness of our sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, but ultimately he was crucified so that he would go into death.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then through the resurrection, he would come up the other side of death, destroying it forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: The point of the resurrection is Jesus saying, I have defeated death.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why you can't tell the story of the cross without also speaking about Jesus rising from the dead, because the point of the cross is what the cross accomplishes through Jesus' resurrection.
[SPEAKER_00]: So death is the ultimate enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to try and pretend that death is no big deal, that it's just the circle of life, really doesn't work for most people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote him a sitting in my office some years ago, talking and praying with someone who had lost their child to cancer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the grief was overwhelming.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the worst days of my life have had to sit with someone who had lost their child tragically their life cut short to this disease.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet what was remarkable about that conversation, about that meeting, as we cried and prayed together, was also the incredible sense of hope,
[SPEAKER_00]: Even in the pain, even in the wide God, could you let this happen?
[SPEAKER_00]: There was also a deep, deep, abiding hope that was not determined by the circumstances where that person could say, yet I know, with everything in me.
[SPEAKER_00]: that this death is not the end of our relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: One day I will hold my child again.
[SPEAKER_00]: One day I will see them face-to-face.
[SPEAKER_00]: One day will be restored in love and relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's what people most want to know.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's on the other side of the grave.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it can't care if whatever heaven looks like if it's angels, it would robes and harps, or whatever heaven is.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing that people want heaven to be more than anything is a place where they'll be restored in love and relationship with the people they have lost.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus guarantees that, that's what He's saying.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has done through the resurrection that we put our trust in Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He takes us by the hand when we go through our own death, because He's been there.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knows how to walk that path.
[SPEAKER_00]: He takes us by the hand when we go through our own death.
[SPEAKER_00]: He leads us through the darkness of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: and up out the other side into resurrection because he's been there, he knows the way, he's defeated our enemy and he can take us through it too.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why we put our faith in Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just to have our sins forgiven, but so that we can join Him in the resurrection.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is what Paul says in one Corinthians 15, that if there is no resurrection, then our faith is pointless.
[SPEAKER_00]: He might as well do anything else than be a Christian.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if the resurrection is true, if Jesus really did rise from the grave, then that changes everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: That changes everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: The resurrection is the cross and the resurrection are the heart of our faith, because in the death of Jesus we say, Jesus has taken on everything that we deserved.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has dealt with our sins, He has dealt with our rebellion, He has dealt with the punishment that should have been ours.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then in the resurrection we're saying and Jesus defeated all of that he rose to new life He takes us with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a glorious hope and a glorious future awaiting us in him And therefore we do not need to be afraid of death because death is a defeated foe That is really good news So there is incredible hope that we can experience even in grief even in pain and
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to illustrate that with something with an episode in the life of Jesus in just a second.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what I do want to say, just to come back to the circle of life here for a minute, is what I notice when I was thinking about this, is the Lion King lies to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you know this?
[SPEAKER_00]: The Lion King lies to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just because it says, oh, the circle of life, you know, when you die, it's no big deal, you just, you know, you join everything, you become part of the whole of the world and everything like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But actually, when you watch the story of the Lion King carefully, what do you discover?
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't even believe that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't actually believe that narrative.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because after Simba runs away, his blame for his father's death and all of that, he falls apart and he has his crisis.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is it that brings him back to his senses and gets him back on the path of courage to face his future and fight the battles he needs to fight?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not him realizing, oh, isn't it wonderful that my dad has now joined the circle of life?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's when he has a vision of his father from beyond the grave!
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's lying to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: It says the moment that Simba recovers his courage is the moment that his father visits him from beyond the other side of death, which is something the movie doesn't believe is possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's lying to you and what it's really saying is actually the Christian story is true and the circle of life is complete.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bullocks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here we go.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we find hope for ourselves, even in the midst of our own suffering and struggle, even in the midst of facing our own deaths, or the deaths of our loved ones?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a beautiful story.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to read the whole thing because I run out of time, but there's a beautiful story in Jonah Levin.
[SPEAKER_00]: where Jesus arrives at the grave side of his friend Lazarus.
[SPEAKER_00]: They all probably know the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not actually the point of the story, because the reality is, Lazarus has been given a brief reprieve, but at some point in the future, he's gonna get sick and die again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: He's going to have to go through this, or in fact, he probably bothered by it, if I was Lazarus, I'd be like, dude, why don't you just leave me in the grave?
[SPEAKER_00]: Come on.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I have to go through this all over again now.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's my little paraphrase John 11.
[SPEAKER_00]: I shouldn't probably preach these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what happens, even as Jesus arrives at Lazarus' grave side, and there's a bit of a backstory to all of this, Martha was really upset with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: because she says to him, Lord, if you had been here, this would have happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know anyone in the world who's a follower of Jesus when terrible things happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't ask that question too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every Christian does, even though we have faith in Jesus, when we suffer, we still say, Jesus, how could you let this happen?
[SPEAKER_00]: I trust in you, and I know you've got the power to do it, why don't you fix this?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why don't you fix this Jesus?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why did you let this happen?
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus doesn't give Martha a straight answer to the question frustratingly, but what he does say is he says, do you believe in the resurrection Martha?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you believe that one day you will rise again?
[SPEAKER_00]: And Martha says, yeah, I know, I'll rise again in the resurrection of the last day.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, that's not exactly what he says, but that's again my paraphrase.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not asking you whether you believe that one day there'll be a resurrection.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm asking you do you believe in the resurrection?
[SPEAKER_00]: And she is probably confused by this.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then he gives her the answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like your hope is not that one day God's going to work it all out for you and everything will be wonderful at some point in the future.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, Jesus says, I am the resurrection and the life.
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, He's saying, keep your eyes on me, and even though you will, at times, go through hell, and you'll still, you'll have to go through death.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you keep your eyes on me, you will have hope through it, because I am the resurrection and the life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, do you believe this?
[SPEAKER_00]: And she says, yes, Lord, I believe this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he could have left it that, but that's not where this story ends.
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, they go to Lazarus' grave side.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it says in verse 33 that when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a very weak English translation of something much more guttural.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't just deeply moved on the inside, feeling a little bit sad.
[SPEAKER_00]: What these words mean is that he kind of doubled over and he bellowed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He roared with pain.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've ever seen someone go through a tragedy and you watch them roared with pain.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what we're talking about here.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's at the grave side of his friend.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is the resurrection of the life.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's the king of kings and lot of lords.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's the Messiah and the Savior of all things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, in the face of death, Jesus weeps, verse 35, and he bellows, and he rules with anger and pain.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what those words mean.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you translate them properly,
[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder if the translators couldn't quite go there because it feels really hard to say, hang on, how is it that the savor of the world, God and Him and flesh could go through those kinds of emotions, knowing that He has the power to fix it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason is, because Jesus doesn't just demand that we trust Him and then believe everything will be okay, and therefore we have hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: What He does as we walk through life,
[SPEAKER_00]: as that he is continually entering into our pain with us and suffering with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't just do it one time on the cross.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every time you suffer, every time you face fear, every time you go through anxiety, every time you feel psychic pain, every time you feel physical pain, he is there with you in it, experiencing it with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's not just we have a hope that one day everything will be made new, which we do believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we also believe that Jesus himself is the resurrection in the life, which means he's with us in what we go through as the presence day to day moment by moment of that resurrection and life promise.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for me, that's what gives me hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not that I can just say, yep, everything's going to be great at the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: which I do believe, but I also have a Savior who says, I'm deeply moved in spirit and deeply troubled, and I'll roll with pain when you go through that too, and I'm with you in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll take you through life, moment by moment step by step, and I'll get you safely to the other side.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the promise.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, of course I believe,
[SPEAKER_00]: That when Jesus returns and the dead are raised and all things are made new and everything is healed and all of our fears and all of our pain and all of our suffering and all of that, every tear we've ever we've wiped away from our eyes, and I believe that's true, but I also need to save you.
[SPEAKER_00]: who is walking with me in the midst of life, day by day, moment by moment, who knows what I feel and who feels it with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: The beautiful thing about the Christian story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is the Christian hope doesn't deny suffering and sorrow, but it does believe we can transfigure it and we can make meaning out of it through the resurrection of Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we don't send them into lies or avoid death.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can face it with courage, with the help of the one who conquered it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we don't clutch to thin comforts.
[SPEAKER_00]: We receive a living hope, Jesus is our living hope, that enables us to endure and to love and to sacrifice and most importantly, have a vision that's beyond ourselves so that we can help others to experience his love and grace and mercy as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not all just about me, but it's my part in the unfolding story of God's glorious transformative eternal kingdom that when it comes and it is coming even now
[SPEAKER_00]: As we say on Easter Sunday morning, Christ is risen, his risen indeed, and therefore we believe all things will be made well, or manner of things will be well, but I want to leave you with these final words that are almost some of the last words that Jesus speaks in the Bible in the Book of Revelation.
[SPEAKER_00]: when he comes to earth and he looks as in the eyes and he heals our broken hearts and he heals our broken bodies and he gives us back our dignity and our hope and our future and he says to each and every one of us do not be afraid because behold or low I am making all things new
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the hope of our salvation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lord Jesus, I thank you so much for these great and precious promises.
[SPEAKER_00]: We get to celebrate tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have been reminded through this whole series of just what an incredible privilege and blessing it is to be a follower of Jesus, to be one of your children.
[SPEAKER_00]: to know these promises and to be able to build my life on them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thank you, Lord, that you know every single person here in this room, you know what they've been through, you know what they're going through now, and your promises to them, just as it was to Martha, look at me, I am the resurrection and the life.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is an incredible promise and we thank you so much Jesus that you are willing to lay down everything for our sake, to go through death for our sake, to go through all of that so that you could come out on the other side into life forever, so that we know and we have such great hope that you will do the same for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we anchor ourselves to you by faith and we say thank you, Lord, for all that you have done.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thank you, that it's a free gift.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not given on the basis of my worth.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not given on the basis of whether I deserve it, I certainly can't earn it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so tonight, Lord, I just renew my faith in you, I surrender my life again to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I turned my heart and my gaze to you and I do pray Lord that you would challenge me strip away from my life and from all of our lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anything that we have substituted you for that we've made more important in our life
[SPEAKER_00]: or the ideal body or whatever it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: God Jesus helped us to lay aside those things that we can receive what will truly give us life, and what will truly give us hope, and what will truly give our lives meaning, and it's you and you alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so Lord, we confess that in a million different ways, we betray that, we betray you,
[SPEAKER_00]: But we're so sorry, and we ask that it would be restored to your rightful place in our lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, thinking, you know, hearts in our hopes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do pray, Lord, for anyone here tonight, who has been searching for you, been coming to this series, lots of questions I pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe even tonight, they would take a step of faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just say, okay, Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even half of what I've heard about what she've done is true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to put my trust in you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to follow you.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I do that tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you're a believer and you just need to renew your faith in Christ tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know in your heart of hearts that you've been walking away.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's take a moment to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lord Jesus, we thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: But don't we stand and pray the Lord's prayer together as we conclude this questioning Christianity.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think we have it on the screen, hopefully you know it by heart, if not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just bumble a long and be carried along by the spreads of others.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our Father in Heaven, hello be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our sins as we forgive those sinigas.
[SPEAKER_00]: We just nod into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.
[SPEAKER_00]: The yours is the kingdom, power, and the glory.
[SPEAKER_00]: And never, never, never, never, never, never.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's seek together.