GYC 2008: For This Purpose

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Shawn Boonstra ~ Faith and Reason: Reaching the Post-modern Mind

Shawn Boonstra

Speaking to the Mind and Heart, Part I

Father, we know this morning when we opened our eyes that that first breath we took was a gift from you.

To think that we were worthy of nothing but death and here the human race is 6000 years into rebellion and you cling to us because you love us and you've developed a plan to save this world.

Father how exciting to be a part of that plan.

When we understand that you've moved heaven and earth, given your Son for us, it fills our hearts with hope and joy.

Today we want to think about how to speak to the world and share that message.

And we want to give you praise and glory for what happens today.

I ask that you forgive my sin this morning.

You know that's a challenge for me in the mornings and I just pray that what we say and do would be to the glory of Jesus Christ.

There's a tendency, many people believe the Dutch invented the microscope.

There's a tendency when you're looking through a microscope, what was Anton Leeuwenhoek, I think, invented the thing.

Looked through the telescope and he discovered something marvelous.

But there's a tendency when you're looking through a microscope to live in the world of the germs and forget to come back out and look at the results on people.

You can study detail and forget the big picture.

And what I want to do with today's subject is we're talking about this phenomenon of postmodernism.

You've spent several hours now on the microscope looking at fine detail and so on.

I want to lift up above it and look at the big picture and take a look at it from God's perspective.

There have been so many books written about how do we appeal to the modern generation and the secular mind and so on.

And what happens is we get so bogged down in the details and we study them and debate them and discuss them and we never get back out in the street winning people and I want to avoid that.

There's the trap of studying a subject to death but never doing anything about it and I want to get away from that this morning.

If I can get this, I got remote upside down, It works better this way.

What's true for you is not necessarily moral relativism.

We need to make sure that that's a mental supposition and not a declaration.

Here's the problem with the whole postmodern movement.

I mean really what people talk about when they talk about postmodernism, it really stems from the early 1990s.

I mean the roots of it run much deeper, the philosophical roots of it run much deeper, but as a movement that the church has been looking at, it's really from the early 1990s.

So 1 of the problems is our definitions are really fuzzy.

It's kind of like trying to write a book about the Bush presidency after 1 term.

We don't know what the long-term ramifications are.

They're really not going to be able to analyze Bush's presidency for another 20 years accurately when they can look back at it and see the big picture.

It's kind of like that with postmodernism.

It's this movement that people sense is happening and growing, but it's not far enough in that we can clearly define it yet.

It's kind of like when I was a kid, it was the hippies.

You're giving something away when you raise your hand.

We all knew what a hippie was, didn't we?

Long hair, smoked pot, live in a VW van, tie-dyed t-shirt, right?

We knew what a hippie was, but we really didn't know what that movement was about until it was over and people started going back and looking at it.

1 of the things we discovered invariably about the whole hippie movement is that it was a fad and it came and went.

I'm going to be bold enough to suggest to you this morning that the postmodern movement will prove to be the same way.

Prophetically I know that and I'll demonstrate it to you over the course of the class.

We kind of have a vague sense of it, but we don't really know what it is.

Well, we got to back up and I'm going to teach you a five-minute world history class.

When the barbarians, my ancestors, attacked Rome, these are my ancestors, Teutonic tribes of Europe, the Germans, the Dutch, I'm of Dutch descent.

When the barbarians attacked Rome, they lit it on fire.

Go back and look at the classical paintings.

What were the barbarians doing when they attacked Rome?

All the paintings have all the buildings burning.

And 1 of the things they burnt were the libraries.

Because a bunch of illiterate barbarians really were only interested in the money and a number of other things and they didn't care what was in the library and they set it on fire.

The problem with that is that Rome was the focus of the world as far as learning went.

Everything that the world thought was important to know were in Roman libraries and in the library down in Egypt and so on, but really the focus of all learning through the ages, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, was all collected in their own...

So now we're in danger of losing all the learning the world had accumulated to that point.

We've lost science, we've lost philosophy, math, all the stuff they're studying.

And this is why they often, if you talk to secular historians, they call that period the Dark Ages.

We call it the Dark Ages for a number of other reasons, but the lights kind of go out.

People aren't studying anymore and all the knowledge is in danger of being lost.

All of a sudden, way across the European continent, this illiterate tribe known as the Celts suddenly wakes up.

Speaking to the Mind and Heart, Part II

Father, I want to thank you so much for your love, for giving us minds, for calling us to action, and giving us a plan.

We'd left off talking about heaven's sanctuary.

The disciples are told, you don't leave Jerusalem, you don't go to work until the Holy Spirit comes.

The point we're trying to establish is very simple.

The entire plan of salvation was planned by God in the beginning.

The postmodern movement didn't surprise God.

He had a plan that included the last day generation, and he says, you don't work unless Jesus is running the show.

So the plan of salvation has almost this much to do with us.

God knows what He's doing and He's running the show.

Look at this, John 3, verse 3, 1 of the most famous verses in the Bible.

Jesus answered, said to Nicodemus, Most assuredly I say to you, unless 1 is what?

Literally in the Greek, it doesn't say born again.

The whole plan is run from the sanctuary.

He knew what He was doing and He's not surprised by the post-modern movement.

Unless He is born from above, He can't see the Kingdom of God.

I mean, we've gotten so bogged down in surveys and studies and philosophy that we missed the point.

Nothing can happen without Jesus running the show.

We need to fit into God's plan instead of making 1 up ourselves.

We're very busy trying to make 1 up ourselves.

We're always trying to re-guess what we've been told to do.

Again, It's important you speak language that people understand when you speak to people.

There's a logical way to present our truths.

But don't make up your own plan and don't re-guess God's.

We wouldn't have gotten caught up in this whole post-modern thing.

And a lot of the foolishness, if I can speak boldly, a lot of the foolishness that's going on is because we think we have to rewrite God's plan.

In the name of trying something different.

God didn't call us to try something different.

I don't want to make this so black and white that you miss the point.

We have to speak a language people understand, but God didn't invite us to reinvent the plan that He designed Himself.

If you've ever been in some of my classes before, you will have seen some of what I'm about to show you.

Jesus has an approach for the disappointed and despondent mind.

That's what we've discovered about the post-moderns.

We've discovered that society gave up on God and clung to reason, and now we have a generation that's given up on reason.

Fortunately, we have a story in which Jesus shows us how to relate to somebody who's despondent and doesn't see meaning in things, and it's found in Luke chapter 24.

Luke chapter, let's see if that comes up.

We've got 2 guys who are utterly despondent.

Everything that happens in this world, particularly in the last days, is prefigured somewhere in the Bible.

Behold 2 of them went that day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem, about 3 score furlongs.

They talked together of all these things which had happened.

And it came to pass that while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near and went with them." So here we have 2 guys that are disappointed and their reasoning.

Is their reasoning bringing them comfort, yes or no?

Kind of like the postmodern movement, human reason is failing us.

As a matter of fact, as they're busy reasoning, Jesus shows up.

He's standing right there and they don't recognize him.

Is that analogous for the postmodern movement?

Their eyes were holding that they should not know him.

And he said to them, What manner of communications are these that you have 1 to another as you walk and are sad.

Series

Shawn Boonstra ~ Faith and Reason: Reaching the Post-modern Mind

Speaking to the Mind and Heart, Part II

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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