Standing Firm for Christ in a Postmodern World | Erwin Lutzer

Now we should have compassion. Jesus had compassion on the multitudes. So compassion is very important. But compassion cannot be the means by which we determine all truth. Truth is truth whether we believe it or not. Pilate learned that you can kill a man but you can't kill truth. Dr. Lutzer, welcome back to Focus on the Family. So glad to be with you again. It's always a meal. I get my spiritual fork and knife ready to go. You're just throwing it on the plate and we just start consuming it. This, I think, given the content of what you're talking about, and that is Christians in a culture that don't embrace Christianity, this is an exciting topic for me. I think my evangelistic heart comes alive with this kind of content because we so desperately want people to know the good news and we don't want to be the impediment. Our bad personality attributes, our anger, our being miffed at a culture that doesn't embrace what God has told us can really stir our hearts in a negative way. Man, we should not be the reason that somebody turns away from God, right? That's right. But at the same time, they need truth, which they might feel is offensive, but they need to hear it. So we'll get into those kinds of issues in this program. Let's start with the obvious, the eclipse of God. What were you trying to convey with the very title? Well, when you stop to think of it, if there's an eclipse of the sun, and we all know that what happens is the moon comes between the earth and the sun, and the sun is unaffected. The sun is just as bright as ever, but the moon of secularism has brought darkness on the land. You know, the Bible says in Isaiah chapter 59 verse 1, your sins have caused me to turn my face away from you. So what I do in the book is as I set this up, I talk about what darkness looks like, I talk about what light looks like, and I remind people that we're living at a time when the moon of secularism is constantly encroaching on the church, it is coming into places that we have not experienced in the past, and the question is, how do we relate to this in this present moment? I love the metaphor that the only disappointing part is an eclipse of the moon in reality is pretty quick. It lasts about 30 minutes. Yes. This seems to be lingering, this eclipse of the culture, this darkness that you're talking about. And I think the darkness is increasing. Yeah. I point out in the book that, you know, I think that as the dominoes begin to fall, that even the treatment of children and such things that we have in our schools today, all of that is going to accelerate. It doesn't seem as if the darkness is retreating. So the question is, what do we do as believers? And one of the points that I want to emphasize in the book is, first of all, how does the darkness come to us? And then I also want to talk about the sovereignty of God, the fact that we must see God in the midst of this. But we also have to ask this question, what are the lessons that we can learn from the past that we can apply to the present situation that we are in, lessons that relate to the church but also to us as individuals? Man, you have said so much in that statement. We are going to take it chunk by chunk. Let's start with this concept. Well, first let me say this, I'm hopeful. I am not a pessimist. I mean, if anything, I had a non-believer friend of mine say to me once, if you guys, meaning Christians, if you guys are worried, I should be really worried because you're not supposed to be worried. Right? Isn't that an insight? I mean, that's an amazing insight. That really is. At the same time, that doesn't mean that we're going to win. It means that ultimately we are going to see God in the midst of our predicament. Because remember this, God doesn't wait to see the news through his providential hand. God makes the news. So to your point, Jim, what you could have said to him is, yes, I'm not worried because God has already lived my tomorrows. Yeah, that's a great line, which will probably stop them in their tracks. That's right. And they'll think about that. Why is it so important for Christians to remember the culture war is a spiritual one? Because I mean, I've been in those trenches. It's very difficult to take the fruit of the spirit into the culture war. Love, joy, peace, goodness, kindness, mercy. Those don't feel like effective tools to battle in the culture war, but they are. The problem is we're living at a time of irrationality. We're living at a time where superior ideas don't necessarily win the argument. So to your point, we have to understand that behind this there is a cosmic battle between the spiritual forces of darkness and the spiritual forces of light. And we have to understand that behind all this, that is going on, and therefore we do fight differently. Because to emphasize the point again, we're living at a time when 2 plus 2 is equal to 5. If I might say that, you know, this is taken from George Orwell. When 2 plus 2 is equal to 5, and when rational arguments no longer work. For example, if you say children from a two-parent home turn out better than one parent or no parent on average, you won't be met by statistics to show differently. You'll be vilified. So it's a different kind of culture, and we're going to be talking about that, but in the midst of all of this, what we have to do indeed is to see God, and to know what our place is in a society that is clearly losing its way. You know, and sometimes the consistency of being able to do that can be our difficulty. I remember I was debating on a cable news channel a woman who was pro-abortion, Jimu Green. I mean, it's out there in the records, so I'm not saying anything I shouldn't say. And she came out of the gates accusing me of falsifying ultrasounds through our Option Ultrasound program, which are just ultrasounds of babies. I mean, I don't know how you falsify that. And that we set up fake clinics to help women, but we really don't help women. She just came out of the gate with all these accusations. And, you know, I sat quietly, I smiled, I listened to what she had to say, and we had the debate. But at the very end, I just thanked the Lord because I felt like the Lord gave me this to say to her. On live television, I said, Jimu, can I just say, I'm so glad your mom chose life for you. And she had nowhere to go. I mean, what do you say? I'm not? That's illogical. I'm here, right? And I just feel like that is one of the best ways to express God's presence, his personality toward people is don't get rattled, don't get angry at the anger, but remain calm, as calm as you can, and pray and ask the Lord for a word that basically just lays it out there. When you think of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, they actually served the wicked king Nebuchadnezzar. I don't think people stop and really think about that. But you know, they did. Yeah, they just did. So it's a reminder of the fact that there are some things in the culture that we can go along with. But when it came to bowing down before the image, that's where they said no. And they made one of the most remarkable statements of faith anyone could make, when they said, we believe, O king, that our God is able to deliver us, and we believe that he will. But if not, we will not bow down. They didn't have certainty that they were going to be delivered from the fiery furnace. But they said, no matter the consequences, we will be faithful. And that reminds us that every Christian has to think through, where are these lines? I can maybe go along with this, but I can't go along with that biblically. And that's what we have to help people think through. Yeah, along those lines, Dr. Lutzer, the cultural concepts about truth and about identity and about so much of what we believe is truth, flawed and built on really bad foundations. Walk us through some of the influences that brought us to, as a culture, these understandings. All right, let me begin this way. Recently, I was in the city of Berlin, and when you walk up the stairs at Berlin University, there's a statement there by Karl Marx. It's in German, but I translated it into English for the people that were there. What it says is this, hitherto philosophers have only described the world, but the point is, how do you change it? So, John, I need to respond to you by saying that philosophers have greatly influenced the world. And that's why I have a chapter, for example, that discusses very briefly Karl Marx. I do that because Nietzsche said God was dead, and he said that there were grave diggers that dug the grave for God. And I asked, who are these people? Well, there were many, but one was Karl Marx, who began the whole idea of oppressed versus oppressor. He was interested in the destruction of the family, because after all, the family is oppressive. Men oppress their wives, parents oppress their children, they take them to church, and God is the ultimate oppressor. So he objected to God as ruler. But this is critical. The next man is Darwin. Darwin says in one of his quotes that the devil came to us in the form of a baboon who is our grandfather. Now, let everyone stop and think about this. If we came up through the animal world, and if the baboon is our grandfather, we have no argument against abortion, infanticide, no argument against euthanasia. We do that for animals, and according to the secular world view, we are only more highly developed. Here's where the Bible speaks so directly. It says that we are created in the image of God, and that's why most people in the back of their minds know that we aren't just animals, but they don't realize that's because of the creation account in the book of Genesis. And then the third person I discuss is Freud, because Freud believed that sexual pleasure is the highest desire, and he attacked God, actually, as lawgiver. So this darkness comes to Europe. And in my book, what I talk about is what are the lessons that we have to learn that the church in Europe teaches us, because for the most part, the church in Europe was totally taken up by these ideas, and these shadows, of course, have come to the United States. And I say this with a heavy heart. We cannot take the continued existence of our churches for granted. I've been to St. Petersburg, Russia, and they took me into a church that was a museum during the communist era. And we can't just think here in America that things are going to go on the way they're going to go on. There are forces that are pounding against us, as you well know. The second lesson that is so critical is sometimes these changes come incrementally, so you don't even see them. It's one small compromise after another. Good people sometimes have compromise simply because of pressure. The pressure is so great that even though they know better, they go against their consciences, and they descend into darkness and become a part of it. Now, very quickly, what happened to the church in Europe, of course, is that these philosophers pounded against the church, but in addition, there were termites within the church that weakened it. And many people possibly have not heard of Hitler's program entitled Operation Grief. Brilliant idea. It didn't work, but brilliant. What he said is this. Let's take the uniforms of dead Allied soldiers, for example, British soldiers, American soldiers, let's put them on some of our troops, then they can go behind the lines and be with the Allies and create problems. So that happened. They were giving false information, false rumors. They took road signs and changed them. Now, it didn't work well because what happened is, the fact is that the Germans, even though they spoke English, they still had a German accent. That's exactly what happens in the church. You have false prophets who are wearing the uniform of Christianity, but are actually working against us. And that was happening in the church in Europe. You have men like Friedrich Schleiermacher. Don't you think, Jim, he must be German? Probably. You say that very well. And what did he teach? Religion was but the feeling of absolute dependence. Okay. Doctrine no longer matters much. What matters is feeling. So think of how that has seeped into our culture. And the church. And the church. And so the people of Europe, unfortunately, were in a position where they were given a brand of Christianity that was not worth living for, much less dying for. And that's why the church was overrun largely, there were many exceptions, but largely by the Nazi agenda and other darkness that came to Europe. You know, in that context, what do we do to respond to that kind of false gospel in the church in the West? I mean, what do Christians who are trying to live with spiritual truth, how do we combat that within the body? There are different ways that we can approach it. If you're speaking to the individual who's listening to this broadcast that is in a church that is no longer gospel preaching, they have to think seriously about leaving that church and, by God's grace, finding a church that is still faithful to the gospel. On the other hand, it has to serve as a warning to the pastors and the leaders of churches who are leading people astray because of cultural currents that are really unbiblical. And so in order to negotiate all that, in order to nuance it, that, of course, is a longer story. But everyone has to ask themselves the question, is my church being faithful? Am I being faithful? Or are we trimming the gospel in order to make it culturally relevant? For example, in my book, I quote someone who wrote a book on how liberalism came to Britain. And notice this quote. He says, there was a period of time when the cross was still preached, but it was so bedecked with flowers that nobody could see it. In other words, the gospel was still there, but it was so flowery and so undemanding and so inclusive that the gospel of repentance and faith in Christ was lost, and there was not a clear proclamation of the gospel, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus. Sin in all of its horror and grace in all of its beauty was lost. There is this idea out there that we can remake God according to our own image. And God is more tolerant than he used to be. In fact, one of the longest chapters in my book is entitled, Is God More Tolerant Than He Used to Be? Because in the Old Testament, you have stonings, you have the killing of the Canaanites and so forth. That doesn't happen today. So the question really comes down to this, how do we relate to God and how do we understand him? And we have created God in our own image, and we have domesticated God, we have trivialized sin, we have brought God down to our level. So to put it in clear terms, there are many Americans who don't mind saying they believe in God just as long as they are God. And what we've done is we have therefore created an image of God, we have trimmed him down. And that's why the subtitle of the book is, you know, it is really the disastrous search for a more inclusive deity. You know, when you study the doctrine of God, Jim, God can be very demanding. Now, we emphasize that along with grace, of course. But at the same time, standing for truth is never really popular. What can Christians do to influence these cultural ideas that are damaging to humanity, not helping us? Well, first of all, it begins with the family. How about this quote, we have to focus on the family. That's a good idea. That's a good idea. Because I think it begins in the home, where Christians have the responsibility of the education of their children. Now, we're living at a time when we cannot trust the public schools. We could go into that, and I could illustrate that. But the point is simply this, that God is going to hold parents responsible. I'm not saying that every parent is able to send their child to a faith-based school, but rather to ask themselves the question, what am I doing as a responsible parent to guide my children in truth, to help them to separate Christ from culture, knowing we can accept some of the culture, but we can't accept all of the culture? Let me give you an illustration. Years ago, Rebecca and I were in the Czech Republic, and we met with a pastor who said this, under the communist regime, we hung together as a church. If somebody lost his job because of faithfulness, we all chimed in, and we helped them financially, we brought food, and so forth. But then freedom came. And with freedom, eventually, came the cell phone. And he says, we're losing the next generation to the culture. And I'm not blaming it all on the cell phone, but that has a great deal of impact in today's society. So what's happening is we have these cultural streams around us that we don't even recognize. You remember the story, you've probably heard it, about the fish that were swimming along, and an older fish came and said, how's the water today, boys? And the two younger fish, after the older one was gone, said, what did he mean by water? We are so inundated with a culture that we don't even see it. So it begins with a home, it begins with a church, it begins with prayer, seeking God, because oftentimes the answers are very difficult and very unclear. And there is this battle that's going on, and I think oftentimes we don't want to use those terms. And I think sometimes we're shamed into not using those terms. There's no battle, what are you talking about? But we need to be aware of what spiritually is happening. In the area of teachers, we have two teachers sitting in the gallery listening to this taping right now. And this is true, there are really wonderful teachers in public schools, and there are real wonderful Christian teachers in public schools, and we want to recognize that. But it's as if the system, those that are controlling curriculum, those that are dictating what needs to be done in public education, are putting social re-engineering far out in front of basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. And it's destroying the trust in the public school system. So I just want to make that distinction. Yes, and the sexualization of children today in our schools is terrible. It's destroying the next generation. You know, I've written a book about Hitler, and I can't help but going back to him. When he said, in effect, to the German people, you take care of the child, you clothe them, you feed them, but their hearts will belong to the Reich, namely the German Empire. And that's the way culture is today. Parents feed their child, they take their child to school, but oftentimes the heart of the child belongs to the world. Yeah, and that's so discouraging. What is the positivity, spiritually speaking, about the moment we're in? What do we hope in when we look at the landscape of culture and go, wow, this is really dark? You know, Jim, I've given quite a bit of thought to the question that you've asked. How do we develop within the next generation, and for that matter within ourselves, the ability to stand against the culture? And I think it can only happen when we begin to live life not for this life, but for the life to come. Amen. When I look at people who have died as martyrs, for example, their hope was not in this life. I spoke to a man who was a pastor in East Germany, and he said during the communist era, he said only about 15% of the people continued to go to church and to identify with Christianity. Why? Because the pressure was so great. You might lose your job if you go to church, your children won't have an education. Now, who are these 15%? They were people who said this life is not as important as the life to come. Therefore, what I'm going to do is to invest in eternity and believe that I will be rewarded for faithfulness, and I don't need to see that reward in this life. I believe that it will be mine in the life to come. As a matter of fact, when Niemöller stood up against Hitler, there were those who said, now, you know, you shouldn't have confronted him directly. How does this make the church look? And I believe that I'm quoting him correctly when he said, the issue is not how we look on earth, the issue is how do we look in heaven. So as we introduce children and others to heroes, we always have to come down to this question. How much are we willing to suffer for the cause of Christ, and how much do we believe in the world to come that makes the suffering of this world totally worth it? Most of our listeners will remember that the prophet Isaiah in chapter 6. The Bible says, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. Uzziah was a relatively good king. He ended a little badly, but here's the point. God was saying to the prophet, the throne of Israel may be empty, but the throne in heaven is well occupied. But you know, when you look at history, you find throughout the ages, oftentimes, the church has always been an island of righteousness in a sea of paganism. And in that sense, our battles are not new. Now they are new in the sense of technology and all, but the church has always had to stand against the culture. And sometimes I think, you know, that's what we are called to do. You encountered, I think, some Germans at an airport. Now, a lot of your writings, you go to Germany quite a bit. It sounds like you even speak German. Is that true? My parents spoke German at home, but we answered in English. So I know enough that I can ask questions and get along, but I really am not fluent in German. Like, did you take the trash out? You can answer that in German? I'm sure, yes. But in that context, you encountered some Germans at an airport. You had a pretty interesting exchange with them that you noted in the book. What happened? I always try to take an opportunity to witness to people that I meet, and there are many ways to get into a conversation about God. So here are these people. They have a layover at O'Hare, and I was there also with some time on my hands. I began to talk to them about God, and then they said that they had just read the book Conversations with God by Neil Donald Walsh. My heart sank because I had just read the book. Conversations with God, in the opening section, the author mentions that he felt as if he was writing by inspiration. In other words, the ideas came to him. This is very common in occult circles. What the book says, and I have quotes, of course, that I can back this up, but it says basically that you don't have to worry about God's will because God's will for you is your will for you. He says the big illusion is the fact that God has a certain will that you have to find when all that he wants is what you want. So here's an idea of God that brings God down to the common man that really says God is like us. And if you believe in a God who agrees with you about everything, you're actually agreeing with yourself, all right? It's called a mirror. It's called a mirror. So what we have to do is to get back to the God of the Bible, and that's really my burden in this book, to show how God is necessary for truth, how God is necessary for law. And then the last chapter of the book, I think, is going to raise some eyebrows because it is getting back to the God of grace and wrath, not the God of unconditional love. Well, in fact, you mention in the book, you say the culture has created a sin-friendly God. Yes. Whew, that connects. Describe, I mean, in part it's what you just said from that book, but describe it more fully. Why are so many Christians and churches even, denominations, leaning into this idea of sin-friendly God, that he gets us and he knows us and it's okay? Okay. Well, you know, the Apostle Paul answers that when he says that there are going to be teachers who are going to teach in accordance with human desires. So the God that we desire is the God that we can control, the God who agrees with us about everything, and the God who never asks us to repent of our sins, but rather is a God who affirms who we are, and therefore everything is positive. It's not a God who is going to judge anyone seriously. Oh my, no, that God died years ago. So what we have done is we've created this image of God, and you know, in the book I use an illustration. I've only gone golfing once. That was it, huh? That was it, 1970-something. There was a pond and a duck flew off her nest, and I went and looked in the nest, and she was sitting on one lone golf ball. I've often thought about that, Mother Duck. All of the images that she had in her mind about this little duckling that was going to hatch. But you know, illusions, no matter how firmly believed, are still illusions. And people have to realize that we have illusions about God that we long to believe, but unfortunately they are false illusions, and what we have to do is to get back to the God who demands repentance, a God filled with grace, but also a God filled with wrath, and we need to return to him. Erwin, so much of today's conversation in the cultural space is about, well, your truth is good for you, and my truth is good for me. I mean, again, it's absurd to even say that. I mean, there's gravity, things fall from the sky, there's science, things happen the way of a predictable nature. Is it even close to the fact that we can't know spiritual truth, the way the world's talking about it today? Jim, I can't thank you enough for asking that question, because in my book I have an entire chapter on truth or truthiness. Yeah, truthiness. Truthiness. That's a better way to say it. Something might be true, maybe sometimes it's true, it's not always true, it might be false, but it has some truthiness. Here's what parents need to understand. They send their child to university or college, and oftentimes the children come back thinking very differently than their parents, and their parents say, what happened? Well, this is what happened, among other things. Truth no longer is something to be sought. You know, there was a time when you and I believed that truth was something that existed outside of us. We would have to seek it, we might disagree as to how to get there, we might even disagree on whether or not we did get there, but truth was objective. Now, according to Karl Marx, truth is culturally conditioned, it is culturally constructed. So now we have teachers who tell their students, what you have to do is to read texts, but they're all propaganda. What you have to do is to find out, why is this person writing that? It's to hang on to power. And so you have multiple readings, so you have multiple readings, even for something like the Constitution, and history oftentimes becomes not a search for facts, but rather an opportunity for minority groups to express who they are. And here's the bottom line. Truth now becomes something that resides in me, and it becomes a matter of feeling. If you look at the LGBTQ plus community and its advances, it has advanced primarily because of feelings and compassion. Now, we should have compassion. Jesus had compassion on the multitudes. So compassion is very important. But compassion cannot be the means by which we determine all truth, because we might be compassionate even toward evil things. So we're living in a culture where therefore, as you described it, you have your truth, I have my truth. And what happens, by the way, if our truth conflicts? Well, don't worry about that, because we're living in an era in which you can live with conflicting truth. And what we have to do is to help people to understand this. Number one, truth has objectivity. Two plus two is equal to four. And you can argue, as Winston does in the book by George Orwell, that it's equal to five at times, but that's wrong. We all know that truth has objectivity. It exists outside of us. The other thing is that truth is truth, whether we believe it or not. Fascinating story, the 18th chapter of the book of John. Jesus is standing before Pilate, and Pilate is asking him, who are you, and so forth. And Jesus said, I came to bear witness to the truth. Interestingly, Jesus didn't say, I came to earth to make people feel better, although we would all argue that the gospel makes people feel better. I came to bear witness to the truth. Pilate says, what is truth? And you remember the story. He immediately leaves Jesus and goes and talks to the mob. Don't you wish Pilate had stayed there and listened to Jesus? Well, we know that Jesus made truth statements elsewhere, but here's the point. Pilate learned that you can kill a man, but you can't kill truth. And Jesus is standing there as the truth with objectivity. And truth can be very offensive. A number of times in the gospel it says that when Jesus spoke to them they were offended, but it is better to offend people lovingly, of course, but to offend them with the truth than it is to whisper lies to them, thinking that that is more loving. I like to emphasize this, that when it comes to love, when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, they didn't stop loving. They just started to love the wrong things. Lovers of money, lovers of self, lovers of pleasure. So we must understand that when it comes to truth, all truth ultimately is rooted in God. And when we begin there, we begin to understand why it is then that we need God in our culture. Dr. Lutzer, let me clarify something. In the book you mention idolatry. I think those of us that have seen the gladiator, we think of idolatry as, you know, little wooden statues that we create and we bow and worship to this thing. That's not what you're talking about with modern-day idolatry. So give me a description or a definition of what modern-day idolatry looks like. All right, I'll go directly to the scriptures. Ezekiel chapter 14. These people have set up idols in their own hearts. So modern idolatry does not bow before the images, but it bows to itself. It is really self that is the modern idol. And idols do have some value. Jeremiah talks about the idols. He says it's like a scarecrow in a garden. In other words, it may cause some birds to fly away. The other good thing about an idol, and the reason it's so attractive, is you control it completely. You choose your idol, and then you go for that idol, and you pretend that that idol is real, and you take it from there. So we're living in a culture, undoubtedly, that has taken man and put it in the place of God, and that, of course, is the ultimate idolatry. And as all of us know, that's what happened in the Garden of Eden, when the serpent said, you can be like God, knowing good and evil. You take the place of God. And we think, for example, of those who say, I am God. And we smile, and we say, I don't think that you are. You know, so often, when I've encountered people like that, what screams at me is pain. Somewhere, something's happened, where they have been profoundly hurt. Maybe by a parent, a father, a mother, whatever it might be. But as I've dug into many of the communities you're talking about, and talked with people, there's a lot of pain in people that have rejected God. Somebody once said to me, to an atheist, he said, you know, for not believing in God, you talk a lot about God, about how much you hate God, about how God can't be real. But what an interesting observation, that a lot of the irritated non-believers spend a bit of time talking about a God they don't believe in. Yes, because it's very difficult to chisel God out of the human heart. You remember Augustine on the first page of his Confessions, where he said, thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find they're all in thee. But I find what you've said very interesting. What we have to do is to help people to understand that even if the church hurt them, even if their parents hurt them, ultimately, truth is constant. And while that might be an excuse to avoid the truth, ultimately, God is a God of truth. And I'm sorry about your past. I hope that you can forgive your past, but at the same time, just recognize that truth is still truth, even if it is rejected. In fact, you illustrated a play on words with this idea that sinners are in the hands of an angry God, and you flipped that, that God has been placed in the hands of angry sinners. I mean, that's... That's actually because of Jonathan Edwards' sermon. Yeah. I mean, wow. You know, sinners in the hands of an angry God, and today we have, indeed, God in the hands of angry sinners. I think that's the way in which I talk about it. I mean, that's powerful, but what's the net of that, and the way we get that wrong, and how we need to be careful about that expression? We have so softened the image of God that we have made him so tolerant of everything. And that's why the subtitle of my book says, America's Disastrous Search for a More Inclusive Deity. We want a God who's going to save everybody. We want a God who's going to allow for all kinds of infractions without any judgment. And yet, at the same time, as you and I agree, that even as we speak about the God, and we speak about hell, we at the same time speak about the unbelievable grace of God, and we point sinners to a God who is willing to forgive, a God who sent his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to forgive us of our sins, and to welcome us into heaven as if we are Jesus, because we get there on the basis of his merit and not our own. We've all heard the song, clothed in his righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne. So what we have to do is to realize that even though God is a God of wrath, he's not the God of popular culture. He is also a God of unmistakable, unbelievable grace. I have to add this. If you think that you deserve grace and have it coming to you, you do not understand grace. Grace is totally undeserved, and yet we have a gracious God who is willing to forgive the vilest of sinners. Yeah, oh my goodness. Let me ask this, this idea of values within the culture. It seems that the greatest value in the culture is tolerance today. I mean, everybody lifts that up really at risk of all the other more important values. In that context, we're told to avoid offending others at all costs, yet you're arguing for the point that Christians should be willing to offend people. Now, I'm sure you mean that within the context of God's love and those things, but how do we shift that gear, being saturated in this idea that we need to be tolerant at all costs toward others, and then say, oh, by the way, Bob, I've noticed something, and I just want to, as a friend, point this out and let you deal with it like you want to, but here's what I'm observing. How do we go about doing that? Well, what we have to do is follow the example of Jesus. He offended people. The Bible says very clearly he offended people. In the sixth chapter of John, when he made some very hard statements, his disciples came to him and said, don't you realize that you offended people? And Jesus didn't care. Now, it's not as if he didn't care in the sense that he was hard-hearted, but rather he was willing to offend people if they needed the truth. And of course, as you and I know, the big challenge for Christians is how do we offend people but not be offensive? How can we make sure that it's the truth that offends people and it's not we who are offensive? I believe this as a pastor. You can preach on any hard doctrine that you want. At Moody Church, at least on two occasions, I preached a message on hell. I could scarcely sleep the night before because it's terrifying. It's a doctrine that is not discussed today. I mean, when is the last time you heard a sermon on hell? It's avoided. Yeah, it's avoided. But we have to preach it with brokenness, with tears, and with a redemptive mindset, as Jonathan Edwards did in his famous sermon. And we have to urge sinners to come to Christ because he saves us, as the Bible says, from the wrath to come. So we exalt Christ. We show that he is the way, the truth, and the life, and we exalt what he has done. So even though this is terrifying over here, there's good news here that you need to hear. So along with the judgment, we always have to keep redemption in mind, and we can't just focus on one without the other. You make mention of the fact that we need to be go-to people for the culture. Now, one that should indicate that people will want to come to us to ask us, what do you think? So I think my question is kind of a two-parter. How do we create that environment where people feel? It's kind of like parenting. Do your kids trust you enough as a father or a mother that they could come and be honest with you about what they've done? I mean, drinking, drug addiction, sex, whatever it may be. Do they have, do you have that good a relationship with your child that they can do that? And then how do we extrapolate that to being that present for people around us in the culture, friends and family members? You know, when we come to truth, like John 14.6, I am the way, the truth, and the life, we have to explain to people that we ourselves are not perfect. If we come to people with a judgmental spirit, putting ourselves on some kind of a pedestal, they will turn against us, no question about it. But if we come with a sense of humility, aware of our own need, it's amazing how we are able to communicate truth to people. They may be offended, but at the same time, they may respect us. So to pull that off is difficult, but that's our assignment. So I think the main issue, Jim, has to do with a prideful spirit, a prideful judgmental spirit that drives people away. We have to help people to understand we're coming from a position where we are not perfect, but at the same time, we have found hope in the gospel, and they can come also where they are at to the same gospel and believe. And that's what I think parents should do. That's what I think pastors should do, but not to avoid the hard teaching of scripture, but at the same time, to always make sure it is balanced with grace. That's so good. What a wonderful resource, and the eclipse of God. This is something you need to get into and read. It's kind of like that textbook. You got to read the paragraphs just one by one and gnaw on the great wisdom that Dr. Lutzer has put into this book. You can get that directly through Focus on the Family. When you do make a gift, we'll send it to you as our way of saying thank you for being part of the ministry. Dr. Lutzer, thank you for being with us again. Thank you for the privilege. Always so good and so meaningful. Thank you. And thank you for joining us today. Dr. Lutzer's book is terrific. As we've said, get a copy from us here at the ministry. Your support allows us to create programs like this and encourage saints around the world to walk more closely with God and to be brighter lights in the culture. Our number is 800-232-6459. 800, the letter A in the word family. Or you can donate generously and request that book when you're at our website. The link is in the program description. Thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ.