Happy Xmas

 
Denying God a Place in Our Life By Pastor Dan Kennedy © December 1, 2013 www.pastorkennedy.com We are entering the Christmas season. We sing Christmas Carols. Some of us put up our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving! We start shopping, or maybe, have already finished our shopping for Christmas. Christmas in North America is filled with many traditions and memories for every family who celebrates the season – whether or not one believes that Jesus Christ ever came to earth, not to mention whether or not one believes that Jesus is God the Son and died to become the Savior of the world. When we, as thinking, reasoning adults, at the welcoming of the Christmas season, sing as our premier song, “We believe”… “in Santa Clause” – at the lighting of our “Holiday Tree”, broadcast live from one of our most cherished consumer shopping malls, we have stooped pretty low as a city, state and nation. We have stolen and supplanted The Event of Our Messiah’s Birth, and have willingly and eagerly given it to marketing impostors. To the mere warm and fuzzy figments of our falling nation’s depraved, Godless, and covetous imagination! I am not willing to give Christmas away so willingly. I will personally rejoice in the celebration of Christ’s Birth! No one can take that away…but myself! Xmas’ Illustration Having such a vivid illustration of how we have ousted Christ from Christmas clearly reveals what many folks have also done with the reality of God in their daily lives! Individuals continually try to find ways that they can live their life “to the full” while X-ing out God: • Deny that they have a Personal Creator. • Deny that they are accountable to God’s Laws. • Deny Jesus Christ’s atoning death, and say that this event was simply too long ago, in a place too far away, which has personally become irrelevant to those in the world. • That there is no God and subsequently, no viable Christ. • That we can live any life we choose. • That we are going to die without consequence and there will be no afterlife. • That we will not face God and responsibility for the way we lived our life. If we find a way to convince ourselves to deny the presence of God we can do what we want, when we want to, without a conscious, and live for the moment, build our own little kingdom, and “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”. How do we take Christ out of Christian? There are several avenues by which we try to find reason to avoid acceptance of God, the reality that He is our Creator, and our accountability to Him. 1. Pride. 2. Corruption of our mind. 3. Succumbing to Overwhelming Emotional and Physical Drives. 1. The Selfish Pride of our Human Heart The human heart has an innate desire for superiority, the need to control, and the hunger to be right – totally from our own perspective and knowledge, without accountability to God. • I am in control. • I know the right way. • I will be OK by myself. • I do not need God. “In Control” We live in a world, free-fall in space.  Flung into perpetual motion by unseen hands.  A massive, rotating sphere of fire, ice and vegetation kept on a precision course with an incomprehensible guidance system. Floating...rushing through eternity, to eternity.  Turning, spinning, but somehow never out of control - not for one nanosecond. We appear on this world’s surface.  We do not know where we came from or how we got there.  We build tiny shelters on this mass, huddle beneath their flimsy structure and say that we are safe.  We walk along the spherical edge of the earth and peer around us; we fly from one point to another, hovering or scurrying like little ants in agents of travel, on top, or just above the earth’s massive crust. We connect with each other endlessly on complicated wireless cutting-edge machines – unfortunately riddled, at times, with bugs, software complications and malicious hackers. We puff out our chest and declare that we are in control.  We all nod our heads to those around us and confidently affirm, “Yes, we know everything we need to know.  We are exponentially gaining knowledge.  We have no need of anybody.  We are in control!” A friend who had nodded enthusiastically with us falls, mysteriously, and without any power to stop it, having been released from the spirit of life, to never breathe again.  Over and over throughout the years, the powerful, the brilliant, the noble, the rich, the talented, the poor, the beggar, and the supposed unexceptional - everyone, without exception, on the crust of this aging world, one by one frailly and mysteriously falls down to his or her own death, never again to awaken in this life.  We tremble with overwhelming sadness at a friend’s death, recall the best we can remember of his or her life, and sadly bury the hollow house of their bodies in the ground, scatter their ashes to the wind, or commit their remains to the sea.  Then we feebly look at each other to gather strength, and, as those who are left, nod reaffirmingly yet once again to each other, “Yes, we are in control!” Our breath stops.  Our spirit is brought before the Living God who placed us on this awesome planet.  We must give an account to Him. There is a way that might seem right...but its end is death. Deceived by Pride We are not the first who have been deceived by pride. A confusing midst and luring shadow of pride has been cast as a over all the earth and over each of us, by the king of pride. • Satan’s Fall because of Pride Ezekiel 28:12b–17 12b “You were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. 13  You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering, sardius, topaz, and diamond, beryl, onyx, and jasper, sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle; and crafted in gold were your settings and your engravings. On the day that you were created they were prepared. 14  You were an anointed guardian cherub. I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God; in the midst of the stones of fire you walked. 15  You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created, till unrighteousness was found in you. 16  In the abundance of your trade you were filled with violence in your midst, and you sinned; so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God, and I destroyed you, O guardian cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire. 17  Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor. I cast you to the ground; I exposed you before kings, to feast their eyes on you. Isaiah 14:12–14 12 “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star (Lucifer), son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! 13 You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north; 14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’ • This also originated for humankind in the Garden of Eden for when Adam and Eve listened to Satan’s voice and rebelled against God’s Command to partake of the forbidden tree … “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil”. Satan was deceived by his own pride, and he then deceived a third of God’s angels into entering a rebellion against God with him (Rev. 12:4). He and the fallen angels have been cast down to earth (Luke 10:18; Rev. 12:7-9) and they, ever since, have been on a massive campaign to establish his diabolical dark kingdom on earth. Their mission is to infect and destroy those Created in God’s Image, by seeking to thwart the spreading of the Redemptive Gospel of Salvation for fallen human beings, through Christ’s Atoning Sacrifice, and the building up of His body through the empowerment of His Holy Spirit. The enemy joins together with our natural human depravity in the further corruption of our minds. 2. The Corruption of our mind Our natural tendency is to set God aside – to disbelieve God and to believe tainted facts, to experience and believe unreliable feelings, and to build our philosophy of life compatible with deceitful facts and feelings. In fact, given our naturally depraved state coupled with Satanic deception, and the world’s influence, our carnal mind is bent on becoming hostile to God. • The Carnal Mind’s Natural Hostility to God Romans 8:5–8 5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. 6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. 8 Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. • Vain Philosophy Our tantalizing thirst and curiosity for knowledge “good and evil” 1 Timothy 6:20–21 20 O Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called “knowledge,” 21 for by professing it some have swerved from the faith. Grace be with you. Ephesians 5:6 6 Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Colossians 2:8 8 See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. We are thirsty for knowledge, but we often draw from a well of knowledge resourcefully contaminated with spiritually hallucinogenic elements…which keeps our minds blissfully deadened. Vain philosophy for the carnal mind softens the potent imminency of Divine Judgment and Reward that each person surely must face, making death seem so far away, when in actuality the very next moment could initiate our final Day of Reckoning before Almighty God. Vain Philosophy whines at the inconvenience and annoyance of the shrill piercing and clanging of the urgent alarm of conviction by the Spirit of God and the guilt of conscience, when the fires of sin and procrastination are burning down yet another “supporting wall” in the fragile structure of our immortal soul. • Pain, Suffering and Sorrow, leading to Bitterness Should we mention how pain, suffering, and sorrow, if not checked, can also turn into bitterness, which can “spring up to cause trouble, and by it many become defiled”? Hebrews 12:14–15 14 Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. 15 See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; Supernatural deception, natural hostility, vain and corrupting philosophy, and/or the pain and suffering in the world join together to have affective impressions on the human psyche in Satan’s war against God. Added to this are still some of the strongest, most compelling lures that prompt our hearts to turn away from God. Emotional and physical drives easily become unrestrained and can, with the other spiritual and mental tactics of the enemy, cause us to make a final decision to throw God away. 3. Compelling Emotional and Physical Drives • Human Survival and Desires for “Success” o To "have” and to be secure in what we have, and to have “more”, can lure us into a covetous place of bondage. • To Love and to be Loved o To be attractive to someone, o To experience the security which a positive relationship should provide, o To enjoy the ecstasy of an intimate physical relationship, and the innate fulfillment of procreation… o To have children – and the comfort of families to care for one another from the beginning of life until its end, from which also the human race is sustained. This premiere human compulsion, when allowed to consume our person outside God-given restraints, has been the means to destroy many a life in the world, including the effectiveness of many Christians who succumbed to its unrestricted passion. • “Two Masters” The choice we must make between “two masters” – God and the world Matthew 6:24 24 “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. 2 Timothy 4:10 10 For Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica. What do these verses mean to you? What is used to Keep God out of our life or Refresh our Spirit to the Lord? • What we put into our mind • What we cultivate in our spirit • What we read • What we listen to • What we play • What we watch • Where we go • What we do • How we treat others • How we respond to God • How we think God responds to us In short…how we choose to daily live. What are the repercussions if God is cast away? • A meaningful relationship with God • Daily peace • The deepest security in life • Guidance by the Holy Spirit • Being under God’s protection • Eternal life with God • What are other areas of meaningful loss? How can we Keep Christ in the Center of our Heart? Running that we may obtain the prize 1 Cor. 9:24 • Remembering what God has done for us. • Responding to others as we would want them to respond to us – keeping short accounts with God and with others. • Receiving daily nutrition from God’s Word and prayer. • Relying on a moment-by-moment relationship with God by communing with Him in our spirit…consistently. • Resting…Casting all our anxiety on Him – because He cares for us. • Making our Hope in God…now and eternally. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 1 Corinthians 13:12 Addendum Anthony Flew has been one of the world’s most recognizable atheists in the 20th Century. This addendum has been added to include some other material originally planned for this message and a small summary and review of parts of Anthony Flew’s book, There is No A God, How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, which would be recommend for your purchase. Fundamental Problems with such an “idyllic” No-God lifestyle • Why do we exist? • Why do we have guilt? • Why is there war, famine, poverty, sorrow, crime and pain? • Why is there death? • What happens to us after we die • Why do we exist? The need for God’s “rules” in our Universe Would you like to see your favorite football, basketball, soccer, or baseball team play a game without the stability of rulebooks, referees, and accountability? What would happen? The whole world is in desperate need of the stability of “laws”. Every mineral, every breathing life, every monstrous star, every tiny cell, every molecule, every sub-atomic lepton and quark is being governed by the stability of the principles of God’s laws, within the boundaries of their spectrum, species and star, within the this vast imperceivable span of the unchartable universe. “The subject of the story and of much subsequent speculation was Professor Antony Flew, author of over thirty professional philosophical works that helped set the agenda for atheism for half a century. In fact, his ‘Theology and Falsification,’ paper first presented at a 1950 meeting of the Oxford University Socratic Club chaired by C.S. Lewis, became the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last century. Now, for the first time, he gives an account of the arguments and evidence that led him to change his mind….” You can be certain that those fellow atheists who surrounded him and applauded his conclusions for many years have not been very happy about Anthony Flew’s change of mind. In the following section, we will look at the facts that changed Professor Flew’s understanding about God. He presents his new found arguments based on three primary levels: • Nature Obeys Laws. • The Dimension of Life. • The Existence of Nature. 1. Nature obeys Laws. a. The Origin of the Laws of Nature. i. Why are there “laws” that are consistently obeyed by all of nature? ii. Where did those “laws” come from? iii. Why are there such complexities, consistencies, and necessary demands for such laws, without which nature could not exist? The Origin and continuity of these Laws point to the fact that there, of necessity, must be a far Superior Mind and Power than that which exists in mere creation itself – it points to the Mind of God. b. The Design of Nature’s Laws and the Power to Create and Implement such number and diversity of these Laws, which hold together or allow the function of our life, planet and universe, point to the existence of a Creator God. These Laws are often identified and known to us by the names of those who “discovered” their existence (these obviously could not “create” the laws!), or by the name being associated with their general function, such as… • Boyle’s law: which stipulates that, given constant temperature, the product of the volume and pressure of a fixed quantity of an ideal gas is constant. • Newton’s first law of motion: which states that an object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force; an object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force. • The Law of the conservation of energy: which declares that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant. Paul Davies, thought to be one of the most influential contemporary expositors of modern science wrote, “Science is based on the assumption that the universe is thoroughly rational and logical at all levels. Atheists claim that the laws [of nature] exist reasonlessly and that the universe is ultimately absurd. As a scientist, I find this hard to accept. There must be an unchanging rational ground in which the logical, orderly nature of the universe is rooted.” (Flew, p. 111) 2. The Dimension of Life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings which arose from matter. a. The Origin of Life and Reproduction. (Life’s origin with its teleological organization.) [Infinite Monkey Theorem – Accidental Evolution, very Accidental Could a thousand monkeys who had been given a thousand typewriters or computers produce a Sonnet by Shakespeare? In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi crested macaques named Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan, in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month, with a link to broadcast the results on a website. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3013959.stm; see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem#cite_note-BBC_News-15 Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it. 2 "Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare" (PDF). vivaria.net. 2002. Retrieved 2006-06-13.[dead link] However, they failed to come up with anything that remotely resembled a word. Paignton Zoo scientific officer Dr Amy Plowman said: "The work was interesting but had little scientific value, except to show that the 'infinite monkey' theory is flawed."] A. Flew continues… “I was particularly impressed with Gerry Schroeder’s point-by-point refutation of what I call the ‘monkey theorem.’ This idea, which has been presented in a number of forms and variations, defends the possibility of life arising by chance using the analogy of a multitude of monkeys banging away on computer keyboards and eventually ending up writing a Shakespearean sonnet. “Schroeder first referred to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it (as well as using it as a bathroom!), the monkeys produce five typed pages – but not a single word. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter [a or i]. A [or i] is a word only if there is a space on either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard has thirty characters (the twenty-six letters and other symbols), then the likelihood of getting a one-letter word is 30 times 30 times 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one chance out of 27,000. “Schroeder then applied the probabilities to the sonnet analogy. ‘What’s the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?’ he asked. He continued: “All the sonnets are the same length. They’re by definition fourteen lines long. I picked the one I knew the opening line for, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ I counted the number of letters; there are 488 letters in that sonnet. What’s the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in the exact sequence as in ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?’? What you end up with is 26 multiplied by itself 488 times – or 26 to the 488th power. Or, in other words, in base 10, 10 to the 690th power. “[Now] the number of particles in the universe – not grains of sand, I’m talking about protons, electrons, and neutrons – is 10 to the 80th. Ten to the 80th is 1 with 80 zeros after it. Ten to the 690th is 1 with 690 zeros after it. There are not enough particles in the universe to write down the trials; you’d be off by a factor of 10 to the 600th. “If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips – forget the monkeys – each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second; if you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second [producing] random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger. Yet the world just thinks the monkeys can do it every time.” (Flew, pgs. 75-77) Additional Notes: • Why do we have guilt? We all have guilt when we do things that we understand to be wrong o There are many universal laws in our universe. o There are universal laws every civilized nation responds to as right, and good – that flow from the 10 Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17). Despising theft The condemnation and punishment of murder The shame and complications of adultery The dishonor of a liar The honor and respect for parents The worship and respect for God and His Person – [if this breaks down then everything else breaks down] An appropriate day for rest and restoration The pain and pitfalls of covetousness o Universal guilt follows breaking laws that were established by God. • Why is there war, famine, poverty, sorrow, crime and pain? • Why is there death? • What happens to us after we die? Below are some concluding encouraging verses for the Christian in Romans 8 12 So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. 13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 28 And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. http://www.pastorkennedy.comhttp://en.wikipedhttp://en.wikipedhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_Councilhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paignton_Zoohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devonhttp://enhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3013959.stmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wihttp://www.vivaria.net/experiments/notes/publication/NOTES_EN.pdfhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rotshapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1shapeimage_1_link_2shapeimage_1_link_3shapeimage_1_link_4shapeimage_1_link_5shapeimage_1_link_6shapeimage_1_link_7shapeimage_1_link_8shapeimage_1_link_9shapeimage_1_link_10shapeimage_1_link_11shapeimage_1_link_12shapeimage_1_link_13