Starting on my other blog ONE A DAY, YOUR SPIRITUAL VITAMINS on Nov
1...a 3 day series on HOW TO LESSEN ANXIETY.
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the link below
A different sermon is begun on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.
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The sermons found on this blog are
selected sermons preached by Rev. Wyrick during a ministry of over 50
years. This syndicated
columnist/minister thanks you for visiting.
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BELOW
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Psalm 14, 1
The fool
hath said in his heart,
There is
no God.”
They are
corrupt,
they have
done abominable works,
there is
none that doeth good.
If someone says they have no religion, it is not
necessarily a stepping stone toward saying, “I have no God.” But it certainly puts God on the back burner.
And then there
is that middle ground between having no religion and complete denial, the giant
question mark called agnosticism which neither affirms or denies God.
Eugene Brussell describes an agnostic this way, “One who
doesn’t know whether God exists, but is afraid to say so loudly in case God might
hear him. ”
The little boy had been taught that God had
no place in his household. So one day, having heard his atheistic father
recount once again that everything in life was just mindless chance, the little
boy looked up and asked, “Does God know we don’t
believe in him?”
Believers do outnumber
unbelievers, agnostics are still in the minority and those who say they have no
religion are certainly not in the majority. But this sermon is not directed at statistics. It is
directed toward those who in the darkness of the darkest night have said,
“There is no light. There is no God. And because I have said it,
it is true. ”
There is no loneliness worse than that
which comes from believing, “I am nothing more than flesh and bone and blood
and I renounce any affirmation that claims I have a soul. ”
Indeed, I remember the first
time I spoke with a man who said that, and looking into his eyes I saw no joy,
no triumph, only resignation.
It is not that a denial of God destroys Him,
or that an acceptance of God replenishes Him.
God is and always shall be, despite what we affirm or do not affirm. He is after
all omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent and not subject to the whims of any
man or woman.
So what is the advantage of believing in and worshiping and
seeking a relationship with this Father God?
It is the same as when we have
a good relationship with our earthly fathers, or have a lack thereof.
We humans
were created for fellowship and we are diminished whenever we fail to establish
such relationships.
I know this; I am a far, far happier man than
I would be if I did not have a relationship with my
heavenly Father. And I steadfastly believe the same could be
said for those nonbelievers, even though
they fervently disagree with me.
And because the Devil is very busy
fighting for as many souls as he can get, I do try to fight him
in word and deed…in everyone of the days God has given me.
And just in case you doubt the need to speak of our faith,
and exhibit our faith every chance we get,
may I
share with you the following…
Back in 1945 when the United Nations was just being
organized, its leaders decided to omit any mention of God in their charter. The reason? To appease atheistic Communists. The atheists
gained a giant foothold and they have not backed off.
Indeed, in Ashgabat, the capital of
Turkmenistan, near the Russian-Iranian border, there actually is a University of Atheism. It offers a six-month course to further the
spread of scientific-atheistic knowledge. And the graduates are expected to continue
“the struggle against religion. ”
There is an
aggressive mind set to atheism these days that no longer just tolerates
believers.
It believes that religion should be
attacked, challenged and refuted at every opportunity. And many are no longer just content to speak against
God… their aim is to remove all reference to Him anywhere and anyway they can.
The
following example is but one of many
Remember the prayer Kindergarten kids once prayed
in our public schools -
We thank you for the flowers so sweet;
We thank you for the food we eat;
We thank you for the birds that sing;
We thank you, God, for everything.
Well, now it hasn’t been prayed since 1963
and I doubt if will ever be prayed in a school again.
They, the
atheists, are very committed. And they continue
to win - time and time again.
Now not all atheists are
aggressive. There are closet atheists
just as there are closet Christians.
But there are a significant number who are articulate,
and denigrate God on a regular
basis.
It wasn’t always like this…this new found pride in
denying God
Indeed, back in the early 1960’s when the American Atheists Organization
held its first convention
in Austin,
Texas, only a dozen people attended—and
two of them ducked under the table when the press
was admitted, and stayed there until the
reporters left. By the 1975 annual convention
960
registered and NONE of them hid. And Mrs.
Madelyn Murray O’Hare, its organizer, said her
organization at that time had a mailing
list of 60,000.
The convention’s “Atheist of the Year” award went to Lloyd Thoren of Petersburg,
Indiana, who
operated a Dial-an-Atheist” service.
And then there is the University of North
Carolina that broke a 130-year old tradition on graduation day in 1972 by not handing out Bibles to
graduating seniors along with their diplomas.
Bibles had been handed out with the diplomas
at Chapel Hill since 1842, but that year the
institution’s Trustees Executive
Committee voted to abolish the practice.
And again the unbelievers won.
Notice
I am calling attention to atheist victories years ago. But unless you have been
hiding in a hole…
…you know that
atheists continue to assault the fact that faith in God is part and parcel of how
America was founded. Our Founding Fathers unashamedly spoke of God
in glowing terms…and
incorporated that belief in the Almighty on
coin and manuscript and everywhere else it seemed
appropriate.
But as a nation today, we have gone to such extremes to
appease this small minority that some things really don’t make sense.
It
is illegal to read the Bible in the public schools of Illinois, but a law requires
the state to provide a Bible for every
convict!
In other words; don’t worry, kids, if you can’t read the
Bible in school, you’ll be able to when you
get to prison!
A question. What causes a person to turn away from
God?
Is it a fear of faith?
Is it a demand to understand every fact, facet and
thought of God? And if not able to
understand,
then declare a victory by saying, “I can’t
prove God for myself…therefore he doesn’t exist.”
Of the atheist I would ask: How
got you to this point? Was it the loss of a loved one?
If the death of a loved one shouts there is
not a loving God…then what did the life of that loved one who did live shout?
If hate denies God’s goodness…what does love affirm?
If
what you have lost has made you sad and bitter…what about what you had before
the loss? Did
that make
you joyous and filled with thanksgiving?
How does that old cliché go? It is better to have loved and lost, (however
the loss took place) than
never to have loved at all.
I will never understand the mind of God or decisions He
makes. Sometimes it’s a miracle.
Sometimes it’s allowing an individual to make a mess of his
or her life. Or sometimes, a mess of a
tragedy comes to call without
being invited.
But if I could understand God’s mind, then my mind would be equal to His and that would be
like a little child trying to completely understand his earthly father.
I like the observation Abraham Lincoln
once made, “I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon
the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into
the heavens
and
say there is no God. "
Or put it this way… for
every garden there is a gardener.
So what can we do? If you haven’t done so already, or recently, read the old,
old story of Jesus and
His love.
Read it… and memorize it…and be so
familiar with it that when it is appropriate…you can repeat it.
quote a miracle …point
out a parable…underline the fact of the resurrection…emphasize heavenly
forgiveness for
earthly sins…just be comfortable with the tenets of your faith.
Point out that for every ugly
moment in life there is a moment of beauty, and for every curse
there is a prayer.
And what of love and brotherhood…these
powerful emotions that rule our lives?
Is it really
believable that they could have risen out of
nothingness?
And the little seemingly inconsequential things
of creation…could some mindless mechanical
chemical eruption have
developed chocolate and peppermint…a cockle-doodle-dooing rooster…a
quacking duck…the sublime
and the slaphappy…proving God does have a sense of humor. Or His
considering how in Fall it would be good to
have leaves not just drop off the tree limbs but first change to
red or gold. And what about a simple thing such as a
smile? That wonderful facial expression
which
actually means the same thing no matter what
language you speak.
And this oblate spheroid called earth we live on that is
93 million miles from the surface of the sun;
why doesn’t
it burn it to a crisp? It doesn’t
because it is tilted at a perfect 23 degree
angle.
Not 22 degrees. Not 24.
And our protective ozone layer that makes it possible for earth to
sustain
life
in the first place? All that just
happened by chance, rather than an orderly mind of God?
And this equal global distribution of the rays of the
sun that make it possible for the food chain to
exist.
And the combination of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere we breathe
every day just happens
to be an exact mix that life needs to exist.
Really? All this
just happened? Mindless nothingness out there throwing nothingness into the air
and
out of this simple non directed act…came our Universe?
It defies logic. It certainly does not deify a human mind that
argues otherwise.
I think not!
Pure and simple, it is a stretch to say that nothing created something - but that is the basic premise
of atheism. A firm belief in unbelief.
The world famous Astronomer, Johannes Kepler, was troubled by one of his
friends who continually
denied the existence of God. Time and
time again he heard him say that the universe came into being
purely by mechanical means.
So one day, Johannes set about constructing a beautiful model of our
galaxy with the sun in the
center and all the planets and their moons
revolving around it.
The next time his friend came into the Observatory and saw the beautiful
model, he exclaimed with
delight,
“How beautiful it is. Who made it?”
And Kepler casually answered. “No one, it made itself. ”
His friend persisted, “Come on now, tell me, who made it?”
To which Kepler finally answered, “Friend, you insist that this mere toy, a
weak imitation of the real
thing, could not make itself, yet I
understand you believe that the great universe did make
itself.”
Did a mindless universe create my own memory? My own brain?
The thought processes that allow
me to
share with you at this moment and for you to understand?
Did the useful arise out of the useless with no direction but rather by
some non-directional
directions?
An American cutlery
manufacturer wrote: “It takes a girl in our factory two days to learn how to
put
the 17 parts of
a meat chopper together.”
And then the cutlery manufacturer
continued, “It may be that these
millions of worlds, all balanced
so wonderfully
in space—it may be they just happened: it may be, by millions of years of
tumbling about,
they finally
arranged themselves.
I don't know. I am merely a plain manufacturer of cutlery. But this I
do know - that you can shake
the 17 parts of
a meat chopper around in a washtub for the next 17 millions of years, and you’ll
never
make a meat
chopper. ”
Alister McGrath, a former atheist and now a
Christian, writes, “I believe in Christianity as I believe
the sun has risen… not
simply because I see it… but because by it I see everything else.”
To put a scalpel to the soul and cut away the
presence of God is a sad debilitating thing.
It is like
turning ones back on a
feast and then wondering with what to fill the emptiness that now exists.
And in closing, remember these words of
truth from Psalm 19-1.
“The Heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. ”
Not…”The Heavens
declare the glory of nothingness and the sky above proclaims the handiwork of nothingness. “
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