face to what we're talking about. I think that very often the issue is not so much truth versus power as it is truth versus a lack of truth or an unwillingness to face truth or truth versus action. And that's what I want to look at. We live in an age that is characterized by a do-it-yourself or self-help mentality. This is especially true of the baby boomer, baby buster generations. And so much as this become endemic in our society, the New York Times has its own bestseller list of self-help books. That's become such a major part of the book market. The thinking of those involved in the counseling field has tended to gravitate toward the self-help end of the spectrum as over against the truth end. I believe, however, that conduct always begins with belief. My assumption is that people may not live what they profess or what they say they believe, but they will always live what they really believe. That, of course, assumes that one may know something and even give mental assent to it at an intellectual level, but still not really believe it. at a functional level. This is what's behind the old adage, what you do, holler so loud I can't hear what you say. It's what God's talking about when he said, these people, Israel, come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. It's what Solomon means, I believe, when he says, above all else, guard your heart, for out of it are the issues of life. I think it's what Jesus meant when he said, by their fruits you will recognize them. It's the principle involved in Paul's statement in Romans 12 to be transformed by the renewing of your mind, not by simply changing contact, modifying behavior. It's what's involved in James' argument that faith without works is dead. Now, the question is going to be asked, How do you know the difference between what a person says they believe and what they really believe? We get some help with that from a rather unexpected source, namely the United States Supreme Court. In a landmark decision, the Wisconsin versus Yoder case in 1972, the court ruled that only Religious beliefs protected by the First Amendment are convictions. That is, beliefs that are consistently acted on. Beliefs that are consistently acted on. If one can be persuaded by anything to deviate from professed beliefs, they are merely preferences, not convictions or true beliefs. Now, the Court identified several things that may cause one to deviate from his announced convictions, namely peer pressure. We don't need any commentary on that, do we? Even in the clergy, peer pressure becomes a controlling factor. The influence of family members, the threat of litigation, the possibility of imprisonment, and the thought of death. Now, some people will say, but, you know, you're talking to a group of evangelical Christians, and evangelicals don't fit into this camp. I was speaking at a conference out east last year and Bernie May from Wycliffe Bible Translators was one of the other speakers and he told me that Wycliffe became aware that they had a flood of inquiries from people who would be potential servants with them. 15,000 of them who never followed up. Now, there have been a few who don't follow up. You understand that. And there are going to be some who will go other places. But 15,000 people wrote to them and asked about possible service, but never took another step. So they began to be curious about why that would be true. They engaged an independent research organization to survey these people anonymously and ask them why they didn't go another step. The four top reasons for not taking another step were that it would involve leaving their family, that it would involve raising their own support and would not provide financial security, that it would involve health and safety risks, and they would have to live at a lower standard of living. Now, if you would ask those people, is Jesus your Savior and Lord, what would they say? Of course, He's my Lord. My Lord, and I won't leave my family for Him, I love my father and mother more than He, that I won't take any risks for Him, that I won't trust Him to supply my needs from His riches and glory. You think we don't have a belief problem? Announced beliefs don't guarantee anything about what is really there. The Supreme Court went on to say that a conviction is a belief that does not change regardless of the circumstances. And it identified the following characteristics of those convictions. First of all, it's predetermined. It's not a spur-of-the-moment decision. It's not this decision-making moment that the situation ethics people talk about, but it's a premeditated response. You know ahead of time what you're going to do and not do. You've thought that through. It's like Daniel and his three friends who purposed in their hearts not to defile themselves. Didn't matter that everybody else that was taken captive over there did it. They'd made up their mind they weren't going to do it. In talking to men particularly about the sexual area, many of them have just not made a premeditated decision about what they're going to do in this area or many other areas of life. So we need to make sure that we're operating on that base. Secondly, it's non-negotiable. No plea bargains. Again, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the king said, I'll give you another chance." They said, King, you don't have to give us another chance. We know right now what we're going to do. There's no need for you to try and bargain with us. There's a very famous illustration that comes out of situation ethics literature about a wealthy old man who propositioned a beautiful young lady about spending the night with him, and she said, certainly not. And he said, well, what if I would offer you $250,000? Well, she said, I'd have to think about that. He said, what about $5,000? He said, what kind of a girl do you think I am? Well, he said, we've already established that, now we're just talking price. Now, that was the issue between God and Job, between Satan and God over Job. You know, Job, God said, have you considered my servant Job, perfect and upright in all of his ways? And he said, sure, but, you know, I've got a hedge around him, I can't touch him. But does a man serve God for nothing? Every man has a price, Satan says, and you pay his price and he'll do it. And you're paying Job well, and no wonder he serves you, but you take away his price and he'll curse you. And God said, no, there are some people who serve me because I'm God, not because the circumstances of their life are pleasant at any given time, so I give you permission to take away his price. You know the story. We won't go into detail on it. And God did that because he knew that Job had made a premeditated, non-negotiable decision that he was going to be true to God. Now, that's what real belief is all about. It's a confident belief. You don't need some indication that you're going to win the case. If we die, we die, the three young men said, or Job's friend. And it's a lived out decision. A lifestyle that is consistent with professed beliefs is evidence of conviction, the court said. Actions show what we really believe. As James says, faith without works is dead. So, if I want to know what you believe, I won't ask you. I'll come and live with you. I'll see what you get upset about. I'll see what you do when you get upset. I'll see what kind of resources you reach for when pressure, when crisis comes in your life. You see, it's one thing to come to church and say all these good words and to sing these wonderful songs. It's another thing to perform that way when the pressure is on. May give a personal illustration. I was in a near fatal automobile accident in 1982. And as I lay in the hospital at the point of death, doctors saying they'd done everything they could do. One of my colleagues came to the hospital at that point. And later he told me, when I saw your wife there in the hospital, I had always admired her, but my estimation of her went up a thousand percent when I saw her there. Why? Because she was drawing on the strength of God. She'd lost her first husband to a stroke of lightning. She'd seen me threatened a time or two before that over in Africa. Came on me lying on the side of the road where a jeep had landed on top of me and I was there unconscious. And now she was facing the possibility of losing me again. And he said, when I saw her faith, it was a genuine faith. That's the question. Do we really believe? Do we have that kind of belief or is it something that we talk about? Now, please don't hear me say when we talk about this to think right is to live right. We're saying believe right is to live right. Thinking, we ought to think right, of course. We ought to think good thoughts. But thinking good thoughts doesn't make it happen. It has to go to a level of commitment if we're going to get there. Knowledge, even right knowledge, doesn't necessarily lead to right actions. Profession may be very orthodox, but very ineffective Paul tells us that knowledge puffs up in 1 Corinthians 8.1. So we're not talking about positive thinking, but positive believing, choosing to believe it because it's true. I also lost my first wife to death after one year of seminary. And we were planning to be missionaries. We had application papers for the mission field and had great plans. And on our first anniversary, she was sick. And 10 days later, I stood by her bed and watched her die. I learned something at that point. One of my teachers from college wrote on a card she sent to me, Tim, God has entrusted you with an experience that he can't trust everyone with. That was a whole new thought, that God was going to use this to build something into my life. And at her funeral, our pastor preached from Psalm 1830, which says, as for God, his way is perfect. The word of the Lord is tried. He is a buckler to all those that put their trust in him. And I began to say, God is good. I choose to believe that. I choose to believe that. And I learned that faith wasn't a feeling, but faith was a choice. that if God says it, then I can choose to believe it, even when my emotions don't tell me that. The devil will tell you you are what you feel, and you're a hypocrite if you do what you don't feel. And we have to understand that that's part of his deception. Now, I don't want to at all imply by what I'm saying that our struggles are going to cease if we just believe right. I am saying that you will not live right, however, unless you believe right. And we still live in a fallen world, a world in which we have a spiritual enemy who is trying any way he can to trip us up. And the battle won't be over until we get to heaven. So our wills are always involved, the choices that we make about what we believe. We have to choose truth up front and keep choosing it all the way. I like Psalm 119.30, where the psalmist says, I have chosen the way of truth. I have committed myself to agree with God. My wife and I talked about this extensively over the last few years. And a few years ago, we made a commitment to each other to say the truth about everything. to agree with God, even when it didn't feel good to agree with God, we were going to agree with God. So we choose the way of truth. Now, let me back off and look at this in one other way. We all have to relate to knowing, being, and doing. What we know, who we are, and how we behave. The question is, how do those things interrelate? What comes first, knowing, being, or doing, and what is that interrelation? Well, there have been many thoughts about that down through time, but I believe that in terms of Christianity, there is an essential order in which we have to see those things, and that first is knowing. We know because God has revealed. Truth is essentially revealed truth. We know God because he has revealed himself, and we know ourselves because of knowing God. So my identity, my sense of who I am, comes from my prior knowledge of who God is, and then my behavior becomes the living out of my sense of being. About 300 years ago, that began to change. At that time, back in the 17th century in Western Europe, theology was considered the queen of the sciences. You go to the major universities, and you would find theology at the core of the curriculum. Everything was related to theology. That would be the best of all worlds for a Christian. And that was a Christian worldview acted out at the university level. But along came the Enlightenment. And Webster defines the Enlightenment as a philosophical movement characterized by rationalism, an impetus toward learning, and a spirit of skepticism and empiricism. The key Enlightenment ideas are the lofty place of human reason, second, the unquestioned superiority of scientific thinking over all other modes of learning. That has permeated our culture with such a vengeance that there are many, many people, even in the church, who are saying, prove it to me, prove it to me, on a logical, rational basis, they won't accept revelation as a base for truth. A third assumption is that the individual thinking person is the final arbiter of truth, not the Bible anymore, but the human reason and my ability to understand it. And fourth, that modern Christian cultures are the summit of human achievement. that we have really reached the peak now in our universities and with all of our learning. Further down the way in the 19th century came Darwin's theory of evolution and the seeds were planted which began to change our worldview in rather drastic ways. While rejected officially by the church, deism has begun to reassert itself as a dominant belief system. The idea that while God created the world, and we assume that if we believe in the creator we have a Christian worldview, but not if we say God went back to heaven and sits on his throne and lets it run according to the scientific laws. And we want to explain everything scientifically. I had one of the leading theologians of the United States and the Evangelical Church say to me, I'm concerned about how deistic my worldview is. Now, what he's saying is, I just never see God working in human life. I can explain everything intellectually. Now, that's unfortunately where our higher education has gone these days. Even our seminaries, unfortunately, we find this happening. A few years ago, David Wells from Gordon-Conwell did a lecture series at Trinity entitled The Disappearance of Theology. And his thesis was that theology and biblical truth are no longer the center even of the life of the church. And that's a pretty dangerous affirmation or accusation to make, but he He substantiated that in a number of ways. He illustrated it, for example, in the attitude toward a pastor. Back in the colonial days, a pastor's job description was essentially four points. He was a pastor teacher. He was a worship leader. He was the godly leader of the church and community. And he was a counselor in time of crisis. It was basically the godly leadership of this man. The Association of Theological Schools, which is the accrediting agency for theological seminaries, has had an ongoing project of providing a job description for a pastor so churches could have this job description and evaluating candidates. That job description today consists of 14 professional competencies. You hear that? Professional competencies as over against godly leadership. Now, there's nothing wrong with being professionally competent. I was the director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Trinity for a number of years, and the aim of that program is to help pastors be more competent in their ministry. But the question is, where do you go to find the base for that kind of competence? Well, Dr. Wells asked that question, and he decided that after seminary or Bible college training, The place that most pastors would turn for help in their practical ministries is the journal Leadership. So he studied the articles published in Leadership over an eight-year period from 1980 to 1988, 434 articles, I believe, and he said, to what extent is there a clear biblical theological base to these articles, and to what extent is there some other? And what do you suppose he found? By his evaluation, less than one percent, four articles, in eight years, had a clear biblical theological base to them. Now, I need to tell you that my friends at Christianity Today disagree with that. They would say that it's more like 40 percent, but even 40 percent is less than half of the articles for pastors that don't have a biblical base. Then they also say, we assume that biblical base. But I've heard that so many times from people in these areas. What Dr. Wells found was that the base for these articles was social science and business management theory. Now again, there's no problem in learning from those areas if we properly integrate them with biblical truth. Man I won't identify, who is in a leadership role in a Christian institution, teaching people how to do Christian counseling, said to me, I do not do spiritual counseling, I do psychological counseling. And I say, how can you do that? How can you take man apart that way and treat him as though he were a neutral here and a spiritual over here? God didn't put us together that way, He put us together this way. But that's what's going on, unfortunately, even in our higher educational institutions today. Harry Bleymeyers, in his book The Christian Mind, says of the Christian mind that it's characterized by six things. First, it's supernatural orientation, not social science, not business management theory. It's supernatural orientation. Secondly, it's awareness of evil. not what are the social pressures and what are your relational problems and so on, but getting back to the evil as the base of human problems, its conception of truth, revealed truth as over against simply truth discovered by the human mind, its acceptance of authority, the authority of the one who has revealed and the one who has spoken. And this is a major problem in our world today. So many people have very loose views of this issue of authority, the concern for the person as over against the group, and finally, as last one is, it's sacramental caste. That's a way of saying that we need to look at life as a constant spiritual experience, that we know no man after the flesh. We see everything through the eyes of God, and life becomes living out those kinds of beliefs. Now, characterize those beliefs with the characteristics of the postmodern times in which we live, as given by Gene Veith in his book entitled Postmodern Times. First of all, there are no absolutes. Secondly, reason and the drive to objectify truth are no more than illusions that seek to cover the desire for power, All institutions, all human relationships, all moral values, and all human creations from works of art to religious ideologies are all expressions and masks of the primal will to power. And he's got some other things that we'll leave behind. But what he's saying is that the things that have taken over our society are the exact opposite of what a Christian mind would be. Now, people say, again, but you say, that's not true of Christians, is it? Well, George Barna, who is the pollster among evangelical Christians these days, reports that in 1994, 75% of all Americans believed that there was no such thing as absolute truth. And in the same poll, how many born-again Christians, you suppose, believed that? at least those who characterize themselves as born again, 62% of them said there is no such thing as absolute truth. Now that's why we've got to start with the truth issue with most of these people, because they're not even at the point where they're willing to assume that just because it's in the Bible, it's true. Just because God said it, it's true. They have been taken over by this kind of thinking. Now this influence has shown up even in Bible colleges and seminaries. In a rather remarkable article in Christianity Today last year, Daniel Wallace, a Dallas seminary prof of New Testament, says that because of his cognitive emphasis, his emphasis on the human mind and rational approach in his seminary training and now in his teaching, His view of God had become distorted in three ways. This is a remarkable confession coming from a New Testament prophet, a place like Dallas Seminary. First of all, he said, the emphasis on knowledge over relationship produced in me a bibliolatry. He said, I was among those who said the Bible is enough. What does the Bible say? If the Bible says it, that's all I need to know. Well, now that sounds very good and that seems to be what I'm saying, doesn't it? Except that the Bible says that it exists to bring us into a living relationship with Christ himself. Jesus said to the Pharisees, you search the scriptures because in them you think you have eternal life and they are they which testify of me and you will not come unto me that you might have life. And he said, I was studying the Bible like a book and I had moved to saying, I believe rather than I trust in. And this came to a head when his little boy was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer, a very, very malignant kind of cancer. And he said, I discovered that at that point it wasn't enough for me to know the theology. I needed to know God. I needed a relationship that went beyond simply a rational approach to state truth. You see, you can state the truth but not believe it. And I have seen so many seminarians come to the end of their seminary training in spiritual defeat, gotten A's on their tests but didn't know God. The net effect of such bibliolatry, he said, is a depersonalization of God. Eventually, we no longer relate to Him. God becomes the object of our investigation rather than the Lord to whom we are subject. The vitality of our religion gets sucked out. As God gets dissected, our stance changes from, I trust in, to, I believe that. And you see, this is the danger of the scientific way of thinking, that it says if you think it and you know it and you can rationalize it, that that's the ultimate. I happen to know of a study done in a major seminary of the faculty, and they were asked, how do you perceive your job? Is it to make disciples or to make scholars? Now, that may not have been the exact wording, but that's the idea behind it. And about half and half of them said that disciples are scholars, and the ones who said it was to make scholars were the Bible and theology professors. And so they come out of these courses with this rational approach to it. And third, he said, part of the motivation for depersonalizing God was my craving for control, as compared to, he was here talking about the Charismatics, lack of control. Wanted everything under control. Don Williams, in his book, Signs, Wonders, and the Kingdom of God, says that his theological education gave him a system of doctrine with which to control my faith, exegetical tools with which to control the Bible, management tools with which to control the church, and counseling tools with which to control people. Now let's face it, most of us would like to have control, don't we? We don't want things out of control. But there's a great danger here, and God basically says to us, I will never let you trust in a method. I won't let you trust in a formula. Look at the Old Testament. He made Israel come back to him every time for new instructions on how to fight the next battle. If it had been us after the Battle of Jericho, we'd have been writing a manual on how to take a double-walled city. But if they did, God never let them use the manual, because every time he had a new plan for them. Why? He said, your trust's got to be here. It's relationship, ultimately, that is important. Now, all of this is to say that if our belief system is polluted at this most basic level, then everything is polluted. Now, we could illustrate this in many ways, but let me focus in closing on just a couple of areas. I think the two most basic areas where Satan attacks us is in our view of God and our view of who we are as children of God. And it's amazing how many people we meet who just have plain wrong views of God, and that includes missionaries and ministers. This all started back in the Garden of Eden where Satan came on this beautiful scene and he said, as God said that you'll die if you eat of that tree, that's a lie, you can't trust God. And look at that fruit. It's beautiful. It would be good to eat. It would make you wise and God will let you have it. How can you believe God loves you? You see what he's doing? He's undermining their confidence in the character of God. And the minute you begin to question whether God is infinitely loving, whether he is unconditionally trustworthy, you're in trouble. You're in trouble. He can start bargaining with you. He can start explaining things away. And that's been going on ever since. He's been creating all kinds of counterfeits of God. We could go through the whole list of non-Christian religions and see the ridiculous ideas of God that he sold to people around the world. He sells caricatures of God to us. We don't go for the idols of other religions, but we may buy the idea that God is mainly judge. who say, wherever I read in the Bible, I feel condemned. One lady, I said, how do you see God? And she said, well, I see him up there with his arms crossed saying, what are you going to shape up? And it was just a very critical God. Or he's a hard to please God. He's like the father for whom nothing was ever good enough. Sat with a missionary down in Latin America, and he wept and wept as he told me about his father. He said, nothing I ever did was good enough for my father. I was never good enough for my father. And now I'm supposed to believe that I that God loves me and that I'm adequate for this ministry that he's giving me. He was moving into leadership role, actually, at that point. And here he was just pouring his heart out to me. And you know who his father was? He was a professor at a well-known evangelical theological school in North America. I was over in England, in Spain, doing a seminar for one of the major mission agencies, and they brought all of their leaders in from the European countries. And the man who put that together, who was their European director about halfway through, he said, can we take a walk? And as we walked, he said, now I understand what's wrong with my son. You've been describing my father. You've been describing me. My son just dropped out of college. He's always been an honor student. He's been the star. He's been the superhero kind of guy. And he said, I can't take it anymore. I can't take it anymore. He wasn't basing his identity on who he was in Christ. He was basing it on his performance. And he said, I can't do that. And the Bible says clearly that we never get to this kind of identity on the basis of our performance. Now, I think that it's absolutely essential that we go back to these very basics. fine missionary couple come to see me, my wife and me, and they were obviously gifted people, a medical doctor and his wife, but they couldn't seem to stay a full term on the field. So I brought out, listen to their story, and brought out four words that I put on a piece of paper, authority, accountability, affirmation, and acceptance, and I said, As you look at those words, how do you see God coming to you? Does He say, as you're accountable to my authority, I will affirm you and accept you? Or does He say, I accept you and affirm you and ask for accountability of my authority? Oh, she said, this way. I said, you know what you've just told me? You've just told me you believe you have to earn the grace of God. And I have to tell you that's absolutely impossible. Do you know what your identity is by virtue of what Christ has done for you and what God says about you? I said, are you a child of God? Are you born again? Oh, yes. Romans 8, 16 and 17 say the spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are the children of God and of children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with his son, Jesus Christ. Can you imagine anybody going to God and say, God, look how accountable I've been to your authority? I deserve to be a joint heir with your son Jesus Christ. That's laughable, isn't it? And yet, I would say most of the people in our churches are trying to do that. They're saying, I'm not good enough. I don't pray enough. I don't read the Bible enough. I don't do this enough. And I say, you'll never do it enough. And you probably won't do it right unless you come this way, unless you believe first that what God has done for you is true. extreme case of this, but I was over in West Africa just a little over a year ago, and I sat with a man who has translated the New Testament into a tribal language and is considered one of the premier translators in that area. But he was having trouble at first affirming that he was a child of God. And we talked about this and talked about what it meant to be a child of God, and I put my diagram in front of him, the ones on page 135 in your book. If you want to turn to that, I'll make just passing reference to it. But we were talking about the difference between unbeliever and believer and what it meant to be a believer. And we talked for an hour and a half. And I said, now, now, where do you see yourself on that page 135? I said, now, where do you see yourself on that diagram? And he said, well, here. And he pointed to believer. And I said, good, good. And if a child, then an heir, heir of God and joint heir with Christ. And he said, well, maybe here. And he pointed to unbelievers. There are many, many people who find it easier to say I'm a sinner and I'm guilty of all kinds of bad things than to say I'm a joint heir with Jesus Christ. And I would submit to you until they're ready to do that, they're probably not really ready to resist the devil effectively on an ongoing basis. I was in another mission situation not long ago and was teaching along this line, and the daughter of the man who was in charge of that particular ministry came and said, this is going to revolutionize my life. Seeing myself as a joint heir with Christ and seated with Him in the heavenly, that's a grace gift, you see. That's something you could never earn. You could never deserve it. And if you wait until you feel worthy of it, you'll never get there. And when she began to understand that, it was like a giant load rolled off her back, and she began to say, I can do that. His secretary said the same thing, and he came to me and he said, you know, isn't it strange? I've been telling these young ladies this for a long time, and a stranger comes in from the outside and says it, and they somehow now believe it. But there was a big difference. What he said was, I've been telling them, look, you're a beautiful young lady, you're talented, you're gifted. What was he doing? He was focusing him right here. What was I doing? I was focusing him up there. OK, and that's all the difference in the world. That's the difference between self-esteem based on a self-examination and whatever you call it, our identity based on our relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, Satan is a deceiver. Satan's primary, primary tactic is deception. And his primary initial object is always your view of God and your view of self as child of God. Because if those aren't right, nothing else is going to be quite right down the way. You're not going to live like something else. If you believe that you're a victim of other people's actions and words, you're going to live like a victim. A professional counselor came to us, a lady who has been in professional counseling for years, taught psychology at a Christian college, but she came because of problems in her own life. And as we went through this, and I showed her this diagram and showed her what it meant to be down at the bottom as a victim versus seated with Christ at the top, something about that visual image of this truth that seems to change. All of a sudden the light went on and she shook her head and she said, I've never gotten away from being down here. I've never learned to live as a child of God. And she said, I hope I've helped somebody over the years. But this is so basic. I don't know. Now, that's what's behind this premise. A person may not live what they profess, but they will always live what they believe. And so I would call us back to reclaiming that first thing in our threefold motto here for the conference, to reclaim truth. Reclaim this kind of a base against this enemy who is out to deceive us, because people may not live what they profess, but they will always live what they really believe. Let's pray. We thank you that you've chosen to reveal yourself to us in such clear and unmistakable ways. We thank you that your grace has provided for us an identity we could never achieve on our own in any possible way. We thank you that we can now live the way you have created us, with the purposes you have intended for us, to the praise of your glorious grace. And I pray that each one of us here may do that in our own lives and may be instrumental in helping the hurting world that you send us to to do that. In Jesus' name, amen.