I'll hold it up a little higher. Camera's right in front of me. It's not. Okay, the cover is mostly black. The painting, or the picture in the middle is Gauguin. That painting we talked about a number of times. With, where, whither. And that was significant in his reissued in 2001, and it has a very powerful introduction by Udo Middleton. And that's worth the price of the book alone. So if you buy a hard copy, or if you use e-readers, get that one, that introduction. I could almost do a book report on that alone. So I'm going to go ahead and get started. So when Schaefer's talking about death in the city, he's not talking about physical death necessarily, although there is physical death involved. But what Schaefer means by death in the city is that man's personality is gone, as well as his relationship with God. That continues to be severely disappearing or dropping like flies on the street, like you said there. So as Jeremiah would have told us, you do not have the proper perspective. Instead of taking comfort in our liberties, we talked about this a little earlier, or the cultural benefits and accomplishments, we should weep again. God worked into history based on his character in Josh, Amos, and Israel, and he will do the same to our generation. Schaeffer identifies turning back to God as more than just affirming correct doctrines, but having a mind centered on God, turning to his word, and seeking restoration only for Jesus Christ. And that is that constructive revolution that he's, that's the whole premise of it, that he is driving toward a constructive revolution within the church and affecting At the close of the second chapter, Schaefer commented, there on page five, closing the chapter, Schaefer says, if we are totally convinced that there is no other way, we are not ready for a reformation and revival. He says, we cannot think that there are other final answers anywhere. We cannot dilute the gospel. We cannot say Jesus and. We cannot say something and Jesus. Jesus is the final answer. Outside the book, as I was preparing, I found a story about Schaefer in the latter days of his life. And it's not in your notes. I thought I'd save it. He says, later at the end of his life when someone told Fran what the reason is, asked Fran what the reason is for being a Christian, he responded by saying, similar to that comment above, there's one reason, and only one reason to be a Christian, which is that you're convinced it is the truth of the universe. In 1978, he found out he had cancer. The treatment was able to push him into remission, and he continued to work for another six years. However, one of his daughters records that at the end of his life, Fran was on his deathbed. She visited with him. She said that Fran was going in and out of consciousness. There were times where he was more lucid than he was at others. Often you'll see a loved one as they're dying doing that. So on several occasions he was more lucid. And on one of those occasions she said, is it true? And Schaefer said, it is absolutely true, absolutely sure. This story, this rendition says, this scene captures the ministry of Schaefer, a dying man who takes the time to answer the questions of another, and even further, that question is the one that Schaefer knew to be the most important one, on his dying bed, absolutely sure. And that goes back 33 years to that year of spiritual crisis that he had in 1951. He had to go all the way back to the beginning and work all the way back through it again. And that ended up setting the stage for that next 30 years of his life in ministry. Instead of resting on what he did X number of years before, he made a decision for Jesus X number of years in his earlier life. He did spend hours and nights walking around the chalet in La Brie, probably gave Edith a number of gray hairs and really stressed her out. And she was praying for him like crazy. And in the end, he came out and says, it is absolutely true, absolutely sure. And he spent the rest of his life believing that. He does turn in chapter 3 to the message of judgment that we've already established that is so key to him. Leland, I don't know if you got back in time to see this. This is the copy I have of Death in the City. It's a reprinting from 2001 and the reason I And, pointing this one out, is that it has an introduction by Udo Mittelman, one of his sons-in-law. And, I'll tell you, that introduction is worth the price of the book alone. He hits three or four home runs just in, in the several pages talking about Schaefer's thought. Some of the, you know, so he applies it in various different ways. Where Schaefer was We did it again a number of years later, fairly recently, and all you have is the text. You don't have some of the added goodies that this particular one has. That's my recommendation. That's your digital copy you showed me. Yeah, but it is available as a hard copy too. I've learned that I read better on these devices. Because I can carry six or eight at the same time and read them when I'm done or something. Yeah, but I like to highlight and mark them. Yeah, you can do that here. It's not quite the same. So again, Schaefer says Christians must weep over the church and their culture. Because culture has gone its own way and the church has not stood up and done the work that it was I think this book is only dated because we don't have examples in the book, but it's not as if the message is not true and pertinent to our lives now. We think, it wasn't Shafer's first one I've heard, but we think that Jeremiah was the one in Hebrews chapter 11 who was referred to as the one who was sawn asunder. There were a number of martyrs, people who suffered persecution or death. He says that most people are identifiable in that, at least somewhat closely, in that hall of faith in chapter 11. But we think that perhaps Jeremiah was that one. stuck in a log, and they cut him to pieces. He didn't have an easy chapter. He didn't have an easy ministry. The message was negative. He had a lot of pushback. The culture in Israel at the time was that from Jeremiah. They were saying, well, you know, we're just having a little downturn in the economy. Yeah, sure, the Assyrians are out there. They're threatening the border. But we're God's people. We've got the temple. And Jeremiah just kept going over and over again. He says, no, it's not good. You are in trouble. You're under judgment. But even going in, God had warned Jeremiah that his message would not be well received. Isaiah is another one that was told. You go, you send this message, you take this message to the people. Isaiah in particular says, how long, O Lord? And he says, you just keep doing it. Keep on, keep on, keep on. And there's a, Schaefer has a phrase in there, he has a chapter, he says, you keep on, you keep on, you keep on, you keep on, and then, When we were talking about the end of Schaeffer's life the Sunday before he died, he watched D. James Kennedy preach that morning on Marxism. And his reaction, I didn't say it at the time because the context wouldn't have made much sense, but he said it at the time, keep on. That was his reaction to that sermon. He was encouraged at that moment that Kennedy was keeping on and getting that message out. I appreciate that. It adds a little emphasis to what you just said. So that would be the context, very likely that that was still in his memory. And he went ahead and used that statement again, keep up. Kind of like Churchill, never, never, never, never, never give up. Jeremiah does say that people of God focused on several faults. Merely external religion was inadequate. He didn't name specific sins. The church was a general apostasy being either idolatry or immorality or just looking away, false prophets and so on. And they were looking for their meaning and safety apart from God. Again, there's that a little bit further down the line, the reference again to adultery and apostasy. They're fundamental in this book and again, that are somewhat related to death in the city. He brings it forward to us, our generation, well the generation of the 1950s and 1960s and further on, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the early 2000s, now the 2020s. We have been so infiltrated by relativism and synthesis Jenny Lin, you know what synthesis is, right? I make things. You make things? Kind of blend them together. Okay. Yeah. So, that's what... Another term is syncretism, especially in the world of ideas. So, you take some of this philosophy and some of this philosophy and you blend them together. Frederick Hegel was one in particular that in terms of perhaps the way Schaefer's talking is that you have a thesis, an idea, and an antithesis, the opposite, and then instead of figuring out which one's right and which one's wrong, you put it together and come up with sentences. And you do that through generations of thought. And it becomes, you don't know what you began with necessarily. Everything, according to Hegel, everything follows that pattern. Sometimes missionaries make that mistake when they're living in foreign countries. The syncretism is... That's true. They try to blend Christianity with their religion. That was sort of controversy in the Middle East. Say if they were in an Arabic country, they would blend scripture with I had a thought there, but I lost it. Related to that. My thought was related to American culture. How we have blended so much of our If you dig much below the surface, you just scratch a little bit and you find out. It's only got a veneer of a little bit. You know, we were joking at church yesterday evening. There's an online business called Mission Aware, and you make Christian t-shirts and coffee mugs and stuff like that. I've been there for a while and they found a mug they liked that says, I can do all things through a verse taken out of context. And that's pretty much the way our life is. I mean, we don't read chapters of the Bible. Well, broadly speaking, people don't read chapter Bibles, not chapters of the Bible. They've got a life verse, or two or three life verses that they string together and they come up with this plan for how they're going to get blessed. And that's the syncretism, I think that one of the results of syncretism that I think Schaefer had in mind, how shallow our biblical knowledge is and the application of it. Oh yeah. I have a list at home of the percentage of people that read the Bible once a week, two or three times a week, every day, you know, and it's amazing how many People that call themselves Christians read the Bible once a week. And you wonder if it's just when they're in church on Sunday. That could be. What percentage have read the whole thing? Even once? My family has. Schaeffer is calling the church to be, in a sense, the covenant. at the bottom of page 6 as to specific sins. Schaeffer says that if the church does not speak against prevailing sins, it is not following God's pattern through Jeremiah. The culture does not believe in absolutes. So Jeremiah says our culture is cutting down the force of truth. We're guilty of looking to the world for help. Again, patterning our worship, patterning our thoughts, conclusion of those thoughts on what we market the church according to the latest business model. There's a church well known to probably you guys that we got notice, I think J.R. was the one that sent it out, or maybe it was John Lee, I don't know. It was John. They're rebranding themselves. Yeah, they've hired a marketing And you know what the verse I thought of about that? When God is telling His people, you're such wicked prostitutes, you're not interested in being paid, you're actually paying for someone else to be a prostitute with you. And that's what we're doing. We're giving God's money to some kind of marketing firm outside the church for the marketing firm to tell the church what the church's mission is. I'm concerned that if this marketing firm finds churches preaching a little bit too heavily on sin, what are they going to deem? Is there going to be a line in the sand that this church says no for? I'm willing, for a quarter of a million dollars, I'm willing to give them their new slogan and their new logo. The logo's a cross, and the slogan is, We Preach Christ Crucified. All right. Wow, that's a winner! There's your identity. Now, where's my check? To that, Schaefer said the church should use Hudson Taylor's phrase, the Lord's work and the Lord's way. He did that throughout his own ministry. There's a book or a short book or a pamphlet out there in that title, which I think is possibly the title of a sermon from No Little People. The book No Little People is a collection of 16 sermons, and I think that might be one of the chapters. If y'all have got a, one of you guys got a Bible? Yeah, hand. Go ahead and turn to Jeremiah 21 for me while I'm getting there. Schaefer says, a church, a culture, or a generation turns from God and his propositional revelation becomes a city of destruction. Again, this must be a repeat from Schaefer. He asked, I think possibly again, do you really believe it is true or are you just going through emotions? The final reality is that God is there and he has spoken to us propositionally and verbally. Propositions being those things that make sense, a sentence that has structure, has a meaning to it, and he speaks through words. That's how we communicate as a culture. Verse 4-7, chapter 21. Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, Behold, I will turn back the weapons of war that are in your hands, and with which you are fighting against the king of Babylon and against the Chaldeans who are besieging you outside the walls, and I will bring them together into the midst of the city. I myself will fight against you with outstretched hand and strong arm, in anger and in fury and in great wrath. And I will strike down the inhabitants of this city, both man and beast. They shall die of a great pestilence. Afterward, declares the Lord, I will give Zedekiah, king of Judah, and his servants, and the people in this city who survived the pestilence, sword, and famine, into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and into the hand of their enemies, into the hand of those who seek their lives. He shall strike them down with the edge of the sword. He shall not pity them, or spare them, or have compassion. The consequences of a church, culture, or a generation that turns from God is a propositional revelation of the city of destruction. How powerful is what Daniel Ann read for us? That's not a very positive message. No, you know, God bless America. I'm glad, thanks for reading that, because that's even stronger than I remembered as I was looking at it. I will be against you. I will bring his weapons into the town for him. I will fight against you for him. And I'll take your king and I'll send him out there. Send him out there in the hands of his enemies. And that's very possibly what could happen to us as a nation, a culture, and a church. That's what Schaeffer's getting across to us. And again, he says that preaching God's judgment is the only preaching that will suffice for a generation like ours. Again, his message was very clear. dance around the topic. He also didn't dance around the people. We must understand that Jeremiah did not only say these things to great men in general, or to the general population, the man on the street. He named them by name. Manasseh, the king. Pashur, the chief governor in the house of the Lord. Zedekiah, the king. letters back to Palestine. Most of these names occur in the latter portion of Jeremiah's prophecy, perhaps later chapters 28, 29, and so on. But he was naming them by name. He was saying, Bel or Dune, because of your sins. He moves on to chapter 4, and the title of that chapter is An Echo of the World. sort of repeats some things that I've already alluded to, where we consult with church, we hire marketing firms, we follow business models to lead us and to direct us and to help us be what we think is successful, and we don't realize that we're not called to that very sense of success. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1, to let him who boasts, boast in Christ alone, and that he belongs to Christ. Schaeffer says that when he prays for his country and for our culture, he does not pray for God's justice. He doesn't say, God be fair to us. Even more, 50 years down the road from Schaeffer's writing this book, we're in a situation like Jeremiah's day. Total destruction against land and its inhabitants. It would reach the central themes of life, our very industry. Everyday life, the joys of marriage, grocery shopping, things like that. Remind you that that destruction would be a 70-year exile in Babylon. Daniel was taken up in that. And I don't think Jeremiah lived long enough to see the end of it. But Daniel was in Babylon, and toward the end, Daniel was reading Jeremiah's prophecies. time to end, and Israel was sent back to the land for restoration. Again, he preached again, Jeremiah preached again against dignitaries and politicians and all leaders, not just regular folks like us. But especially, you know, but yes, definitely to us. He does say, though, that modern religious leaders are guilty. guilty. Our ministry leaders are guilty. Church officers are guilty. Church members are guilty. They, like the others, have walked through God's field and destroyed it. In the book, he has an example that the flora and fauna in the Swiss Alps is very fragile. So you're very careful when you walk through a field not to go trampling through there like a wild horse because it will damage about as real and destroyed it. Again, the blame being on the Evangelical Church. We allow ourselves to be infiltrated. And there's a, give us another lengthy kind of quote. There would be one good way to find out whether a church is apostate or not. Take away its tax advantage. You know, there was some talk about doing that. If you cannot approve of things like gay marriage and transgender politics, then if you're an organization of any kind, you should cycle it comes up through various online comments? Well, it's already been done in regard to politics. You know, we basically said you can't talk about politics in the church or we'll yank your 501c3. So there's already a part of that in effect you might say. But, you know, you see how things are going and it's not hard to anticipate that that's going to become a weapon against the church. That losing your non-profit status is going to be a way of the government punishing you for what you're saying. It depends on what kind of church you are. I mean, there are certain churches where, especially election seasons, certain churches will welcome visiting politicians who can speak all they want. Yeah, they stand up in the pulpit of the church in a church service, and that ought to bother us a little bit. He does, yeah. Yeah, the fact that there's a double standard, I think that kind of goes without saying in light of what just happened at the end of last week. Yeah. I think this sort of connects with the state of the culture, maybe how we got here. At least it did when I highlighted it. It's about that long. What caused such a breakdown in our culture? Two world wars? Don't believe it. If the house had been strong, the house of our culture, it would not have come down with the earthquake. If the heart had not been eaten out of the culture, the world wars would not have broken it. Don't worry, someday, some say, it's only a technological problem and technology will be a solution. Somebody mentioned about technology taking us forward. Man would not be in this position The claim for technology is not true. A man would not be in the position he is simply because of technological problems if he had a really Christian base. An energy crisis? That's serious too. But it is not the heart of the problem. The fact that the United States is now urban rather than agrarian No, that's not the final problem either. To solve only the urban problem or any of these others will be to only heal slightly. You hear it over and over again. Somebody else has got another problem that they think is what's out there. All kinds of secondary solutions to secondary problems. They're real problems, but they're not the central problem, Schaefer says. Men who use theological language to fasten our eyes upon those secondary problems as being central stand under the judgment of God because they have forgotten that the real reason we're in such a mess is that we have turned away from the God who is there and the truth which he has revealed. The problem is that the house is so rotten that even smaller earthquakes shake it to the core. I might add those two wars were just wars. our arrogance and our lifted up prosperity that we thought we could be the police of the whole world. We go over to Afghanistan and we leave $80 billion worth of hardware for our enemies to use against us in the future. Well, that's another larger topic than what we've got time for tonight. Randy's got just a few minutes to bring this over to the finish line. That's us in our blindness. That's how smart we've become. That's what sin does to people. When you try to do something, it backfires on you. That's what we're going through now in our diplomacy right now. Let me go and wrap this up. There is a good chapter on the justice of God, and Schaefer talks about what it is like for a culture to be judged. He goes back to that example that we saw in one of the books that we read earlier about the tape recorder and the moral judgments that the man without the Bible makes and how the man without the Bible is held to that standard, and then the man with the Bible is held to the biblical standard. Go ahead and take a look at my outline there on that one. I want to end with this last chapter, chapter 9, the universe and the two chairs. room, two chairs, and that's all they've got. One man is a materialist. He thinks the only thing that's there is the room, the chair, and the other person as well. The other man has a biblical worldview, though the materialist goes ahead and he devotes a large portion of his time to finding everything out about the the design, the purpose of it. And then he goes and explores the room. And he'll give you an atom by atom breakdown of the walls of that room and every aspect of it. And he'll come back with volumes of the scientific report. The man with the biblical worldview will say, thank you very much. He'll read it. He'll say, thank you very much. That's good research. It tells me a lot about this room. But it's not complete, because you have not told me who made the room, who controls the room. And essentially, the materialist is unbalanced because the materialist only knows half the universe. The materialist in turn thinks the Christian, who I'm just going to call the Christian, not the biblical worldview. invisible being who's not locked into the room with them. But Schaefer says you can't synthesize these two opposing views. One's right and one's wrong. You got to decide which one it is. Krish can only affirm the correct doctrine and they contacted only twice. I'm not reading that sentence well. So you've got a person who becomes Christian and his only contact with the unseen realm, the supernatural world, is when he becomes Christian and when he dies. In between, the Christian is saying, these are the doctrines I believe. He can't live with contact only at two ends. That's what Schaeffer's saying in that sentence. It has to be He uses the term existential living. Moment by moment living, that's what he means by that. In terms of philosophy, I'll give you, hey, Leland. What? Can you tell me briefly, what is existential philosophy? Existential philosophy, I would be more prone to give you an example, you know. There is, it's humanistic, man is, it's very pessimistic. You're talking, you just basically let the cat out of the bag when you said moment by moment, but when you talk about people like Kierkegaard, Let me go ahead and jump in here just for sake of time. But you're on the right track. I kind of wish we had a third hour. I'm having fun anyway. He says there are two basic ways to use the word existential. You may refer to existentialism, which was where I was asking you. He says it's a philosophy that says there's no real or reasonable meaning to man. You affirm your being. You affirm your existence. either good or bad, and it doesn't really matter. And Schaeffer says that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about existential Christian living. It is a moment-by-moment reliance and fellowship with the living God who is there, who has communicated to us, propositioning as he told us in The God Who's There and some of the other things that we've read. So how important it is, We have an understanding of what the universe is, but we also have to have an understanding of how we live in that. And those are the two chairs that professing Christians are faced with. A world that has left a meeting based in God, a church that is in danger, has pretty well tipped over that edge as well, and for us as individuals to live in the reality of the Christian life as revealed in Scripture and in Christ Jesus. Do you remember what you said about no real or reasonable something? Oh, yes. Existentialism is a philosophy that says there is no real or reasonable meaning to man. So it's not real in one sense, it's tangible. But even if it's intangible, there can be a verifiable truth. that is also reasonable, makes sense. It's not contradictory. We talked about Barth and his Jewish scripture where it can have contradictions but still contain the word of God and have spiritual meaning and benefit to you as a person reading it and interacting it. That message might change from person to person, occasion to occasion. So that is the whole encyclopedia. All right, now that we've ended on a mixed metaphor, let's pray briefly before we conclude our class. Father, we do thank you that we continue to have the opportunity to benefit from the wisdom and the teaching of men like Schaefer, men who had a particular understanding of the times, men who had an understanding of the church and her needs, and her weakness, we do pray that we would seek that kind of reformation and revival through the word of God, as we ought. Help us to be strong in the days ahead. Thank you for the men who are working in the ministry, as it were, on the front lines of this spiritual battle, and give them strength for that task. And we pray these things in Christ's name, amen.