Four Great Myths that Define our Times

Tom Shrader teaches that every Christian is called to be a missionary and ambassador for Christ in their local context. He identifies four dangerous cultural myths that Christians must understand to be effective in ministry: that man is basically good, that government can create utopia, that moral values are relative, and that radical individualism is beneficial. Drawing from 2 Corinthians 5, he emphasizes that believers have a ministry of reconciliation and must understand their culture to reach it effectively.

“You are a missionary. You may be a crummy one, but you are a missionary.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: Jesus was Born to Die

Recorded: December 13, 2001

Duration: 40 min

Themes: missionary, reconciliation, cultural, evangelism, ambassador, ministry, witness, purpose, new believer, struggling with purpose, called to ministry, living in secular culture, parent, young adult, mentor, feeling called to serve

Scripture: 2 Corinthians 5:17-20, Ecclesiastes 9:3, Jeremiah 17:9, Romans 5:12, Romans 1, John 16:33, Isaiah, 2 Timothy 3, Hebrews 4:13, Matthew 22:37-38, 1 John 4:11

Theological Themes: missiology, ministry calling, cultural apologetics, new creation, reconciliation doctrine, ambassadorship, worldview, sanctification

Full Transcript

What we're going to do today and next week is get you ready for Christmas in kind of an odd sort of a way. We want to prepare you for the season, and I've been working and developing a theme with you at church for the last probably eight or nine weeks and really grinding, especially the church people, on this theme: You are a missionary.

Here's what Paul writes in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 17: "If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creature, the old things are gone and the new has come." If you're here today and you're a Christian, if you know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, obviously He's not talking about this body - that body has not necessarily changed, still same earth suit. What He's saying is, I'm a new creature inside. For the first time in my life, I can now do good, I can now please God. That's what He's saying. I'm a new creature.

With that comes some responsibility. Now He explains this: "All of this is from God." When you talk about being thankful, when you talk about being moved to praise, there is nothing that ought to move you to praise faster than this truth. All of this stuff is from God. God did it all. You didn't do anything. Nothing you could do, nothing you did do - God did it all.

God Reconciled Us to Himself

It's all from God, who has reconciled us to Himself. So man is reconciled. God and sin are reconciled. You can turn on... This is my favorite time of the year for the irony that drips. You can turn on the radio and you hear these guys that obviously are pagan guys playing Christmas songs. You've got pagan stations singing "God and sin are reconciled." The two top selling Christmas albums of all time are Kenny G and Neil Diamond, two Jews. That's very interesting to me, just in the whole irony of the process. So I can sing these songs, but I may miss this: God and sin are reconciled.

Now if I say to you, "Mark and I have been reconciled," you don't know Mark, you don't know me, you don't know anything except what I just gave you. Mark and I are reconciled. There's one thing you know: there was at least previously some tension in our relationship. If I say we've been reconciled, it implies that we were separated prior to this. God and sin are reconciled. In this instance, God reconciling Himself to us - not us reconciling. These are so subtle, but so key.

We don't reconcile ourselves to God. That's religion. All religion is man trying to reconcile himself to God: "I'll do this, not do this, come over here. I'll try to appease God." No, that's not how it's done. God reconciles us to Him, and He does it in a specific way. He says, "through Christ."

Your Ministry of Reconciliation

He gave us then a ministry of reconciliation. This is a lot of information right out of the box. Here's the deal: Man is sin. He's separated from God. God reconciles Himself to man through Christ. When that's done, I'm a new creature, and He gives me a ministry of reconciliation. Now, that's my job. You're going to have your card printed up, and you just say, "Billy Bob Smith, Christian, Minister of Reconciliation." That's the job title you have.

Let me continue: "Give us a ministry of reconciliation that God was reconciling the world to Himself through Christ, not counting man's sin against him, and He has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore ambassadors for Christ." That's the point I want to get at. You are a minister. You are an ambassador. You carry a ministry of reconciliation.

Now, there's a presupposition in here, and I guarantee you it's a faulty one, and that is that everybody that's listening is a Christian. We know that. We know that in a room like this, not everyone is a Christian. We know clearly. We'll send out 35,000 tapes this year. We know the people who get the tapes. We know they're not all Christians. But we're starting, and we're speaking to you as though you are. If you don't know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you are not a minister of reconciliation. You aren't an ambassador. We don't say that to offend you. It's just of paramount importance that you understand your position.

The Missionary Call

So He says you're an ambassador. You're a missionary. You're a minister. What triggered this, because this is not what I was going to talk about this morning, what triggered this was a breakfast I had two days ago with a guy who decided we ought to have breakfast once a year at Christmas. Perfect. I said, "Let's start a new tradition. You buy. We're building traditions. Let's build a tradition - you buy."

So we're down there, and we're talking, and he starts asking me, because he's got little children, "Where do you think I should send my kids to school? Should I send them to public school? Should I send them to private school? Should I homeschool them?" I'm not a fool. I'm not going to get in the middle of this. I don't know. I said, "Let me just tell you something. Each one of those has extraordinary benefits. Each one of those has a downside. But let me tell you something: if you can get a kid that's 13, 14, or 15 and really grounded in their faith and they're really Christians, a public school is a great environment for them." I'm not advocating that. I didn't send my kids there. But I think if my kids were rock solid, it's a great place. And he said, "Why is that?" I said, "Because they can be a missionary."

And he laughed. He said, "I had a discussion with my brother yesterday who's got a 14-year-old who said, 'I'm not raising my kid to be a missionary.'" So here's my point, and we're going to go from here: You are a missionary. You are an ambassador. That's what that passage says in 2 Corinthians 5. It doesn't say you may be ambassador or you may not be. It says you're an ambassador. So your ambassadorship, your witnessing, your ministering - it's not optional. It's not mandatory. It's inevitable. You are a missionary. You may be a crummy one, but you are a missionary.

Our Mission Field Starts Where We Are

As our girls get a little older and key things happen in their lives, I am so happy that Susan and I have had a philosophy from the beginning that we would educate and raise our kids to be independent of us and become dependent upon God.

You're a missionary. Now, if you're a missionary in this room, what's your mission field? For most of you, that mission field is right here in Maricopa County and may be more limited than that. It may be just within a 4, 5, 6-mile radius here at the hotel. Or your mission field is at the office today or at the club or wherever you are. That's your mission field.

God did not call you to save the world. He didn't even call you to go to the world. He called you to be light in your world where you are. When we get some young kid and he comes to us and he says, "I want to be a missionary, I want to go to India," the first question we ask him is, "What are you doing right now?" Because if you aren't affecting people for Christ in Mesa, why would you do it in Madras? It doesn't make any sense.

Understanding the Culture We're Called to Reach

You're a missionary. When we get a missionary and we're going to send a missionary out, we've got a whole bunch of things we want to do. If we're going to send some guy to the Sudan, we've got to get all the financing in place. We've got all sorts of things we want to do. But one of the things we need to do is we need to understand the culture.

You have to understand the culture, the dos, the don'ts, how they think. Isn't that interesting in all our discussion and trying to figure out all of the Taliban stuff and all of the stuff with Islam and the Muslims? You don't know how they think. You've got to think like them.

Here's what I'm saying to you, and this will occupy 30 minutes. You better understand your culture. And right now, you have in this culture four myths that are at work that if you don't understand these, you're never going to be an effective missionary.

Four Myths That Define Our Times

This is not original stuff with me. I take this from a book that Chuck Colson wrote called Chuck Colson Speaks where he identifies this during an address that he gave just about eight years ago at the University of Chicago. I would add maybe a couple of myths to that.

You see them there? Here's the myth. You've got them on your sheet, that man is good, that we can find utopia, that values are relative, and that radical individualism is a good thing. Those are four myths that he identifies. We'll talk about each one. I would add, if I were going to go, because I find myself thinking, what would I put on this? I think probably one of the myths I would put is the myth that a loving God would never send someone to hell. It seems to me I'd get that in there. But let's look at these four.

The First Myth: Man Is Good

Here's the first one, that man is good. Let me read you. Each one of these has a little sentence with it. This is a great sentence. This myth deludes people into thinking that they are always victims, never villains, always deprived, never depraved.

Let me say it again. If you look into this world and you look around, the culture you live in sees man as a victim, not a villain, as deprived rather than depraved. You know it. We've talked about it. You watch it on the talk shows. You listen to it at night.

If you go on down to Fashion Square and you begin to interview people and you talk about man, here's what they're going to say. Man's basically good. Some of you have friends that are an absolute jerk, and you'll be talking to another guy, and here's how we get around it. We say, "Well, deep down inside, he's really a good person." That man, this illustration we've used, that man's like an onion, and you just peel this away, and as you peel it away, you get down, and there's that core in there that's really good.

You know, if you watch some of the goofy stuff, the Wayne Dyer guy's just been on PBS, so really good, solid illustration of what we're talking about. He'll talk about the spirit that's in you and the good that's in you when I get this thing and unlock the spirit. There's no good in you. That's what the Bible says. The Bible says no one is good, no, not one.

The Myth Leads to False Beliefs About God

Man's not a victim. Man is a villain. Man is not deprived. Man is depraved. When I think man is good, I now get this myth that permeates our culture, the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man.

We aren't universally worshiping the same God. You mean that when the Buddhists pray, they pray to a different God than we do? Absolutely. They pray to a false God. That's so important for us to grab a hold of.

Jesus and the Pharisees' Misunderstanding

When Jesus is dealing with the Pharisees, and it strikes me as I read through the Gospels, Jesus is a very patient fellow most of the time. Not all the time, but most of the time. Gets the money changers, that hacks them off. He gets excited, He throws them out. But there's one group of people that He seems to have almost no patience for as a group. And that is the Pharisees. He can't stand these guys. They drive Him nuts. And I think part of the reason is what He says when He deals with them. You ought to know this by now.

Now individually, like when Nicodemus comes to Him, He shows great patience there. But He's talking to the Pharisees one day. He comes into this synagogue and He sits down. He takes the position of teaching. And He opens the scroll. And He reads from the scroll from the prophet Isaiah. Speaking of the coming Messiah. And then He rolls the scroll up and here's what He says. "Today, that prophecy's been fulfilled."

What He's saying to them is, "Guys, let me just tell you something. You've been praying for thousands of years for the Messiah. You wait for the Messiah. Every day you pray for the Messiah. Here I am." And they don't get it. They're saying, "How can this be?" He says, "Before Abraham was, I was." I said, "I can't believe you're not 30 years old." And here's what He said to them. "You keep reading these scriptures thinking..."

You're going to find life. You're not going to find life in them. They make witness of me." When He's done with His conversation, He turns to them and He says, "You are of your father, the devil. And you're just like your father. Your father, all he did was lie. All he did was murder. That's you."

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that man is basically good. Susan Smith puts three kids in the car, drives it into a river, leaves the kids to drown, and we're trying to figure out what went wrong with Susan Smith. There must have been something in her childhood. Because that's not normal. What God did in that moment with Susan Smith, same thing He did with Bin Laden, same thing He did on September 11th, is He lifted the veil to allow you to see how awful you really are.

The Church That Denies Sin

Let me read a couple of things. I just pulled this. Somebody faxed me this the other day. This is from World Magazine. It's talking about a new church. I'm not going to read all this to you, but it's a church of 7,000 people. It's called the Agape International Spiritual Center. What it is, it's a combination of Christianity and Eastern mysticism.

Here's the interview with the pastor. Agape calls itself a church, but it makes no pretense of being Christian at all. Rather, as its pastor, Michael Betworth, explains, it has brought new thought combined with ancient wisdom. Listen to this. Now, this is where it begins: "We don't believe people are born into sin. We're born into blessing. While some seek salvation, we call it self-elevation."

Agape calls itself "trans-denominational," but it's really trans-religion. Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, young, old, rich, poor. We cut across all lines to reach what is true. Here's where they begin: We're all basically good. That's the myth.

The Biblical Truth About Human Nature

Here's the fact. Ecclesiastes 9:3: "The heart of the sons of men is full of evil." Jeremiah 17:9: "The heart of man is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick. Who can understand it?" Paul says this in Romans 5:12: "Just as through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all men sinned."

Here's the doctrine that we call this: original sin. The doctrine of original sin is this: When Adam sinned, he now brought sin and the consequence of sin to every person that would ever live. And the evidence of that is your physical death. When Adam sinned, we all died in three ways. Number one, death means literally separation. I'm separated from God. That's why God and sin are reconciled. I'm separated. Number two, I'll now physically die. Number three, if God doesn't intervene, I'll die eternally in a place called hell.

You are going into a culture that doesn't believe in original sin. You're going into a culture that says man is basically good.

The Eichmann Testimony

This is a great story. It was a man who was called on to give testimony in the trial years ago of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was a Nazi who presided over the slaughter of millions of Jews. This young man was called in. Dunor was his name. He's a witness in this trial.

When Dunor entered the courtroom and stared at Eichmann behind a bulletproof glass, the man who presided over the slaughter of millions, the courtroom was hushed as the victim confronted the butcher. Suddenly, Dunor began to sob and collapse to the floor, not out of anger, not out of bitterness. As he explained in an interview, what struck him in that instant was the terrifying realization: "I was afraid about myself. I saw that I am capable of doing this exactly like him."

The interviewer seemed to understand this and asked: "How is it possible for a man to act as Eichmann did? Was he a monster? Was he a madman? Or perhaps something even more terrifying, was he normal?" Dunor answered and said, "Eichmann is in all of us."

The Truth About September 11th

The great myth that's out there is that man is basically good. The great truth is, man is lost and sinful and helpless and hopeless and is not good and getting better. He's bad, and there seems to be the tendency that the longer he stays there and the more God removes His hand, the worse he gets. That's Romans 1. God kind of steps aside. Remember that story? Romans 1. They don't honor God, they don't thank God, and God just kind of turns them over. God says, "You go for it."

It's fascinating to me. We're trying to figure out September 11th and what September 11th was, was God for a second saying, "Let me just show you how bad man really is." Here it is. I never sit around - when there's a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Charles Manson or a Ted Bundy or a September 11th, I never sit around and say, "How does that happen?" What baffles me is that it doesn't happen more often. I just don't understand. God is so good. God is so gracious.

I have an article in here. Some of you were around as we processed September 11th. One of the things that I pretty much guaranteed you was it would have no effect. All these Christian religious leaders got all excited. They started talking about revival. They started talking about how everything was going to change.

Here's the hard data. The data is in. There has been no change in church attendance. There was a two-week spike and then it went away. No change in Sunday school. No change in people saying it makes a difference in my life. There's one change and we'll talk about it in a minute.

The Second Myth: Government Can Perfect Human Nature

Here's the second myth: That human nature can be perfected by government. This idea of a utopia. We see all sorts of efforts in this. Communism in its own way, I think on an economic basis, was trying to say let's try to protect and do this thing where we're all equal. By equal they mean identical. You know the fallacy of that. We aren't identical.

Let me remind you of one thing. Government was established by God. Even the Taliban. Even bad government. Even Hitler. Because bad government is better than total anarchy. All government derives its power from God. Your relationship with your government

This is life, and it's your job to obey your government. Unless they command you to do something God forbids, or forbid you to do something God commands, you do it. You're getting ready to figure out taxes—you pay them. Every year I go through this dance with some new Christian who wants to find some way around it. They'll say, "Do you believe that government is wasting our money and they're going to use it for things that you'd be morally opposed to?" I say obviously. "So you don't pay your taxes?" I pay every dime I owe. I don't want to meet these guys. I don't want to know them. That's their job. If that's what they say, that's what they do.

The best citizens on the planet ought to be Christians, but here's what government's never going to do—it's never going to provide you utopia. The closest it can come to utopia is to stay out of your life. I'm working on a new theory right now, and I don't think it's revolutionary. What makes America great is not the people—the people aren't that great. It's the system.

I can take ten people off a boat in Vietnam and in two months they're going to have 18 restaurants. It's the system. You better understand that. It's not the American people—you've got to say that if you're running for office. But it's not the American people that make this place great. It's the system. When you start messing around with this system, you're messing around with what made this thing great.

Government Cannot Create Utopia

But as good as this system is—and I'm a big old free market capital guy—it can't provide you utopia. You know why? You weren't designed to find it here. I have a funeral to do this afternoon and I love doing funerals. This will be a good funeral because this lady had cancer and it was a pretty agonizing death. People are really tender and really open to hear.

What we want to do is rush out and try to create a system with no pain, no suffering, no hurt. That's a robot. You're a human. Here's what Jesus says the night before He dies. He gathers all the guys together and says this by way of encouragement: "The things I've spoken to you, I have spoken that you might have peace because in this world you will have tribulation. But take courage, I've overcome the world" (John 16:33).

This world has tribulation in it. When you say, "I'm going to take out the suffering, I'm going to take out the pain," here's what you're saying: "I'm going to try to take this world and make it something other than it was supposed to be." We do a strange thing at our church. When somebody comes in hurting, we do not try to help them right away. We try to stop for a second and say, "Let's identify the source of the pain. Why are you hurting? What's God trying to teach you in the midst of this? Let's not take away the pain until we learn the lesson."

I can't imagine anything worse than going through what you're going through and at the end of the day not learning the lesson. The great myth is that somehow we can take man and change government, make everything equal, move it around, and have utopia. That's the world you live in. You need to understand this is life. In fact, if you're a Christian, God says it's the trials that produce the strength. They're the spiritual aerobics.

The Third Myth: Moral Relativism

Here's the third myth—this is a biggie: moral relativism. This creates a crisis in the realm of truth. It sows chaos and confusion. Society becomes merely the sum total of individual preferences. All of a sudden I look around and it doesn't matter what's true. In fact, we've even abandoned that.

Chris Matthews the other night—and I like listening to Chris—is doing an interview. He's talking about somebody and says, "Well, that's not normal." Then he said, "Wait, I apologize. I shouldn't use a word like that. That's judgmental." We've reached that point where we're talking about things in such a precise way as to not in any way hurt any person that we've abandoned truth.

Isaiah says this: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil." One of the powerful things that President Bush has done has been able to say—and that's so blatant it makes it easy—the Taliban is evil. This is about good and evil. I just finished the new Peggy Noonan biography on Reagan, and I'm reminded again of how absolutely bold Dutch was when he stood up and said the Soviet Union is an evil empire. You can't get that much anymore.

We Have Found Truth

Here's the truth: not everybody's opinion is right on every issue. If you're here today and you're visiting us, we are glad you're here, and we've got really good news for you. If you've got questions, you came to a place that has the answers. We aren't out searching.

I love to go to the coffee shops and sit around because you can hear some really goofy stuff in those places. You'll hear people talking—whenever you see two guys at 10:30 meeting, or two gals at 10:30, one of the two is practicing amateur psychology almost always. They're trying to figure each other out and trying to define the thing. They've really got questions, and they have all sorts of questions.

We aren't searching in here. We found the truth in here, and here it is right here. This is the mind of God. Everything God wants you to know, He put in His book right here. Everything outside of that is speculation. I'm not very good at dialoguing with people because if it's out there and it's speculation, if He wanted us to know it, it'd be in here. If it's not—

then we're not going to know. I don't know. But don't think that there is no truth.

One of the interesting things that changed after September 11th - Barna did a survey before and after September 11th. Before September 11th, 38% of the American public believed in moral absolutes. After September 11th, 22% believed in moral absolutes. The same thing happened with belief that the Bible is accurate - it declined by 3%. God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator went from 72% before to 68% after. Apparently something happened in that terrorist attack that shook people's faith in the idea of moral absolutes.

The Bible's Purpose in a World Without Moral Absolutes

Here's what Paul writes to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3 about the Bible. He said all Scripture is inspired by God and good for four things: good for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

It's good for teaching. That means this is the material to study in the teaching. Again, in a world that's lost its moral compass, in a world that has no moral true north, here it is right here. This thing always points me to true north. It always points me in the right direction.

In a world that says, "Well, you can't really know," you can say - and this is a great challenge, because you're going to walk into the Christmas party, and now you're talking, and somebody's going to say, "What about September 11th? What about this? What about that?" And you're going to say, "Well, you know, here's what God says, and here's what God said about this." "Well, I don't understand all this. This is why I'm a Muslim." "Don't need to. What do they think Christ is?" "Great prophet." "Oh, they're wrong."

So now, here's what happens. They're going to say to you, "Who made you king?" And, of course, we say, "No one made us king. It's just that we understood who the king was, because now we've got this book." See, that's why you study this book.

That's why, for example, many of you talk to me about how this serves as a church for you. This isn't church, guys. This is a bunch of people in a bar. This isn't church. Don't use this as church. This is nothing more than a tool, maybe a five-iron that's part of your bag that allows you that maybe it's helpful in your life. You need to be in church.

"Well, my church stinks." Here's a revolutionary idea: get out of it. I don't understand why you continue to go to these awful, dead, dying churches. Get out of them. If they're not teaching the truth, get out. And don't try to change them or reform them. That's been done and it didn't work.

Scripture as a Sharp Sword

Here's the second thing. Good for teaching. Good for reproof. That is, exposes sin. Here's what the author of Hebrews writes, speaking of the Word of God. He said it's sharper than a two-edged sword, Hebrews 4:13, and there's no creature hidden from His sight, and all things are open and laid bare. That word "open" is a word that's used in Greek literature to describe a neck that's been absolutely open for purposes of severing the head from the body. That's what the word does.

I was invited into our women's group and I was teaching five things a man needs from his wife. I'm on number one, so we aren't very far into it. There's a gal sitting here who begins to sob. I'm thinking, because I know I'm a little hard sometimes, I probably offended her. So I tried to soften the things I said a little bit and I got to point number two. Now, she's heaving and sobbing. By point number three, it's uncontrollable. I mean, it's now a distraction really to everybody in the room.

I said, "You know what, let's just take a little break here for a second. Are you okay?" She said, "No." She had to leave. Two or three of her friends took her out. So I thought, "Well, we open up a seat for next week," because we just said something.

She came back on Sunday and she said, "You know what happened? For the first time I saw what an awful wife I've been." That wasn't me. That was the first time she took God's Word and laid it down. "Here's what a wife is. Here's what a husband needs." She looked at it and for 15 years, she's been blaming the jerk she's married to, and all of a sudden she discovered she has some role in this.

Personal Testimony of Scripture's Power

The first time I ever went to a Bible study and Larry began to teach and all He did was open the Word. "Here's what it says. Here's what it means." And I am lit. This is no hype. I'm literally shaking as I went back to that office at Coal Banker. My hands literally were shaking and trembling under the fact that I knew and I was convinced that I was a wretched, sinful person.

It's good for teaching. It's good for reproof. Here's a great word: it's good for correction. It's the only time we see the word in the New Testament. It means to restore.

I hope you're not one of those people that comes on and says, "You know what's wrong with you? Here's what's wrong with you," and you don't close the deal. To close the deal is the correction. It means literally to take something that was upside down and turn it right side up. To take a vase that's been knocked off its pedestal and put it back into its proper place. That's what the Word of God does.

This room right here is filled with men and women who have taken lives that were in disarray. Different levels of disarray. Some were very successful. I watched E doing Ocean's Eleven week. So they did a thing on Sinatra the other night. Well, I love Sinatra. So I'm watching this thing and they're talking about Sinatra after He breaks up with Ava Gardner. He's now got Marilyn Monroe going and half of the Vegas showgirls going. He wants to revive His singing career.

The CEO of Capitol Records said Sinatra was incredible. He said he would walk into a room and that room was electrified. He'd walk into a room and it was, hey, how you doing? But he said the minute the door closed he was absolutely miserable. There's none of us that go, man, that's a shock. He had everything. He didn't have everything. He didn't have Christ.

So at various levels, from various backgrounds, in various ways, God has opened up our eyes to say, you know what's deficient in my life? It's not that I need a new spouse or it's not that I need a new house or a new car or a new job or some geographical remedy. What I need is Jesus.

I'm not kidding you today. I don't have time to meet with every one of you, but I can tell you this. Whatever your problem is, Jesus is the answer. Well, not mine. Yes, it is. Jesus is the answer.

Understanding Who God Is and Who We Are

Because when I understand God, and see, this is what happens here. How am I ever going to understand I'm a wretched, sinful person? I'm never going to get it by reading a newspaper. I'm never going to get it by listening to the radio. I'm never going to get it by talking to the guys at the office.

I'm going to get it by this book because two things happen when I read this book. Number one, I find out who God really is. And when I do, number two, I see who I am. The Bible is good for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness. You've been around, know this old phrase. The Bible tells us what's right, what's not right, how to get right, and how to stay right.

The Fourth Myth: Radical Individualism

Here's the fourth myth, and then out the door you go. It's radical individualism. This dismisses the importance of family and church and community, denies the value of sacrifice, and elevates individual rights and pleasures as the ultimate social value.

When I went to school, I'll bet you did too, we were exposed to sociology. And here's what, at least I was taught, maybe you were too, that the fundamental building block of society is what? The family. That's all I was ever taught. The fundamental building block of society is the family.

I'm listening to a sociologist from, I think he was from Stanford, about five years ago, and he said, the fundamental building block of society is the individual. That's a radical shift. That's a radical shift that's now being placed into the minds of much that are at Stanford and all these other places, and now you grow up.

But see, that's where we live. One author says this, the principle of hell is, I am my own. I can go it alone. So what happens in the world is, since I am the most important thing in the universe, then my happiness, my pleasure, my satisfaction, that becomes the ultimate goal.

Here's the statistic, and there's a bunch of them in here, we've talked about it. The statement, I spend nearly all my money on the basic necessities of life. Twenty percent of people making over a hundred grand a year said that's true. Something's out of whack.

The Fact: Love God and Love Others

If that's the myth, what's the fact? Here's the fact. Matthew 22, verse 37-38. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul. This is the great and foremost commandment. The second commandment is love your neighbor as yourself. It's not about you. It's not about going alone.

A Warning About Christian Mysticism

If I can, I've got three minutes here. If I could just give you what I see, I see a real alarming trend in evangelical Christianity, and it's this. We're becoming more and more swept away with this idea of mysticism. More and more time in meditation, more and more time in getting away, more and more time in journaling, more and more time in examination. You can't live the Christian life apart from people.

When you're sitting around, and you just need to know, because I've got the one card on it that says pastor that gets me into meetings that I wouldn't normally get into. And normally we're in these meetings, and it's not at all unusual for me to hear a pastor say, I would love what I do except for the people. And what I get to tell him is, what you do is the people. If you don't love the people, get out. Because that's what this baby's all about.

People are tough, and this is my thing. You're a shepherd, and they're the sheep. And you better unpack this load of bitterness and anger toward them, or by the end of the week, you're going to be craving lamb chop. But they're the sheep. Do you see it?

The Great Commandment and Great Commission Require People

And then we'll close. Here's the great commandment. Love God with all your heart. Love your neighbor as yourself. Here's the great commission. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe the commandments of God. I cannot fulfill the great commandment or the great commission if I don't have people. You see that? You cannot go it alone.

Let me read this list to you very quickly. This is the premise. Beloved, if God loved us so much, we ought to love one another. 1 John 4:11. And then the Bible's filled with these one another's. Be at peace with one another, honor one another, instruct one another, serve one another, forgive one another, encourage one another, don't slander one another, live in harmony with one another.

Christianity Is a Team Sport

Men and women, don't fall into the trap of thinking this is all about you or the individual. There's a sense in which the Christian life is a team sport. They're in it together. Your Christian faith will always be academic. It will always be sterile. It will always be dry if you don't have people around you.

You need to have people that show that you're a lover. You know how we know if you're a lover or not? You've got to be around unlovable people. We don't know if you're a lover or not. We don't know if you've got patience or not until we bring some trying circumstances into your life. We don't know if you've got self-control until we put you in tough areas. We don't know if you're gentle until we give you

Your Mission Field Awaits

The opportunity to be around people who desperately need your gentleness. Do you see this?

Listen, here's the close. As a missionary, going out into that mission field right now, understand you're battling a lot of myths that have been held as truth, therefore they inevitably lead us toward falsehood and false behavior.

Get this. Man is not basically good. He is deceitfully wicked. Man cannot achieve utopia here, but he will have tribulation. Man is not subject to relative values, but absolute values we find in God's Word. And man is not designed to go this alone.

Remember what we said? You have a ministry of reconciliation. The word minister means to serve. Jesus said, "I came not to be served, but to serve." There's your call.

Next week we'll talk about this whole thing of Christmas. What happened at Christmas? What's this big deal? What was this all about? We'll look at that next week.

Father, help us see this truth, would You? And let it change our lives. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.