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Weimar University

Don Mackintosh

Finding Satisfaction and Success

Let's just have an added word of prayer before we look in God's Word.

Father in heaven, Lord, we're thankful today that we have freedom in this country.

Some of us traveled recently in countries where You couldn't really talk about your faith without persecution and very difficult.

Sometimes we take for granted the freedoms we have here.

Help us to take advantage of the freedoms to be able to share with others and relative ease and not take what we have for granted.

I invite you to turn your Bibles today to Psalm 81.

Over the summer, since we returned from Egypt, I've been preaching on the Psalms that reference the Exodus and that reference Egypt And what God did for his people, since it's such a ubiquitous narrative throughout scripture, almost in every place in scripture we find references to the Exodus.

I wanted to study Psalm 80, but I was going back between Psalm 80 and 81.

So I'm gonna do Psalm 80, but I think I'm gonna do it in 2 weeks.

Because The name of that message is gonna be How Jesus Dealt With Depression.

And we have some people that are gonna be here for our depression recovery that time, so I'm saving that message.

In fact, about 2 minutes ago, I was telling them I'm gonna preach it anyway.

But then I decided, no, I'm just gonna go with my notes.

How many of you want to find true satisfaction and success?

I thought for sure it was going to say, amen, but nobody.

And you know, I was thinking, what kind of illustration do I start with?

And I get a newsletter from Duke University that covers all the different research that shows how spirituality and religion intersect with health.

And I was reading through that newsletter and I was reading various articles and then there was a book reference in the back that caught my eye, God Grades and Graduation, Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success.

And I was like, I can't buy another book.

I have a sickness for books and I struggled but then I fell and I bought the book and I read it.

So that's what I'm going to use for the illustration to start out because basically the book says do well in school and you'll do well in life.

You'll be better at getting a good job, you'll be more success and making more income, you'll have improved health and improved longevity and all these studies which I would like to talk pedantically about, but I won't.

But, interestingly enough, improved health and longevity only comes with those with more than 12 years of education.

So, If you have not finished elementary school or high school, forget it, you're not gonna have good health, yet.

Some of you are saying, look, I'm here and I didn't take any education, I'm fine.

So, according to this study, College graduate lives 9 years longer than someone who did not complete high school.

Religious students, called abiders in the studies in this book, religious students in high school get better grades than non-religious students.

As a result, they complete high school more readily and then complete more years of education.

And believe me, I could talk for 20 minutes on this, but I won't.

Because they stay, interestingly enough, in this chapter within God's guardrails, it says.

Secondly, because they learn self-control.

Nellie would love to hear me say that, comprehensive self-control.

I mean, how many of you have ever heard Dr.

And this then has a domino effect where all kinds of things go well and the research is quite clear that religious abiters, Those who really take it seriously, they do better academically in high school and also have a bump into college.

You know, I was thinking, 1 of the reasons in the book that I thought was really interesting they said you know the reason is because Schools were set up by the Protestants.

And it's not quite true because the Catholics had schools too, but the Protestants didn't want to send their students to the Catholic schools.

That's why it's called Maryland, because people followed the idea that Mary was to be worshipped, right?

And then the other states, you know, like Virginia, followed the Virgin Queen, which was Protestant.

And all those states on the seaboard, there was like this great controversy between papal education and Protestant education.

Now, why did the Protestants want to have education?

Because they wanted people to know how to fight against Catholic doctrine, which they thought was wrong, and would take them the wrong direction.

And so to do that, they had to be literate and they had to be able to read the Bible for themselves.

And they should probably read the Bible not only in English, but also in Greek and also in Hebrew.

And so, you know, Harvard College and Yale and Princeton and all these schools taught to a read in the original languages because you had to be able to not just agree you had to be able to say I disagree And this is why I disagree based on the Word of God.

So the whole idea of this book was because of that, the schools essentially, even though there's separation of church and state now, it's not really separate because it's based upon the same paradigm and that's why if you're religious and you learn all those disciplines in church, you do better in school.

I was like, man, I'm so glad I read this book.

Now, 1 of the things that came out of the Protestant Reformation is natural science, the Bible, Protestantism, and the rise of natural science.

And the reason I bring this up is because the book was written by a Jew, Jewish lady who had never really, was a secular Jew.

And the reason she wrote the book was because she went to the park near Stanford where she was going to school.

And she heard all these people talking about how they're going to church with their kids and all the soccer moms and different things.

Everything was revolving around the church.

They don't ever talk about the church in my school, but you guys are all talking about the church.

Why are you all talking about it when we don't talk about it over there?

And then she goes there and she goes, why aren't you talking about the church?

She kind of went off the rail though in the end because she could not believe that religion was so, you know, great for academics.

And so she has the last chapter, extolling the virtues of atheism.

I'm like, man, the cheese slipped off the cracker fast in this book.

And then I'm like, okay, wait a minute, this is a common mistake.

Because in her chapter, the last chapter she's talking about, she's saying, you know, atheists actually are more original thinkers because they're going against the religious culture and all this.

And I go, this lady does not know what she's talking about.

She says because the atheists, they're more evidence-based.

That reminded me of this book, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science.

Nothing is further than the truth because as Protestants began to read the Bible literally and stand up against the Catholic culture that was persecuting them.

They were not bound by the traditions that went along with a Catholic reading of the Bible, all the traditions of the fathers and whatnot.

And these concepts carried over then into the study of nature.

They said we should study nature just like we studied the Bible.

We should look at all the evidence for something.

And then out of that developed a robust scientific method.

So science then is actually a product of the Protestant Reformation.

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Finding Satisfaction and Success

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