Access to the Father (Part 1)

0:45 And of course, you don't even have to turn to it if you've got a Bible, because you know it so well, because I preached it so completely last week. Ephesians chapter 2, verse 18, talks about a great privilege that we've got if we approach God through Christ. And that verse reads this way. For through him we both have access to the Father by one spirit.

1:17 For through him we both have access to the Father by one spirit. now remember what we said before that the context of this verse that talks to us about access and that's what I want to look at one more night so you get an understanding of what this great privilege is if you understand access you'll be able to on the one hand judge whether or not you really are a Christian when you consider what access is you'll have a good way of telling whether you're a Christian or not and if you are a Christian And by thinking of access, you'll realize how little you are dipping into a deep and wonderful well that God's given you and how little you're drawing on it. But don't forget the context. The context of this verse is Paul is making a case that the Christian church is such a remarkable thing. He says one of the reasons how people can see the power of God in the world is by looking at the church.

2:18 He says in the church you've got people. Now he uses the case illustration of Jew and Gentile. people who ordinarily cannot live together, cannot get along, they do get along in the church. And he says there is a bond so strong that's created between Christians that it transcends all other differences between us, class differences, race differences, gender differences, career differences, and so forth. Now, admittedly, I want to admit right off here, that most of the time, in most places, the church does not exhibit that remarkable life. But when the message of Christianity spreads the most effectively, it's when the church's corporate life is remarkable to the point of inexplicability. When the church's corporate life, when the relationships in the life of the church, when a congregation, when the relationships in the congregation are remarkable to the point of inexplicability.

3:18 See, Jesus was a human being. Sometimes we forget that. And he knows how hard it is to believe. He knows that the claims of Christianity are fantastic. He knows that they're too good to be true. That's the way it appears to us. And he knew it was going to be very, very difficult, and therefore he decided to set up Christianity in such a way that there was a plausibility structure that made it easier for skeptical people. I mean, whenever I meet somebody who's skeptical of Christianity, I immediately say, I understand completely. I understand exactly. Who doesn't understand skepticism? Jesus understood it, and therefore he prayed to the Father, O Lord, O Father, I pray that you will make them one, even as we are one, that the world may know you sent me. What's that mean?

4:12 He says, Father, it's going to be very difficult for the world to understand and believe the claims that I make. But let's create an entity, the church, in which the oneness and the unity, the quality of the corporate relationships, the quality of the corporate life, is so remarkable that even skeptics have to say, maybe there's something going on here. Most of the places, most times, that remarkable corporate life is not evident. And yet, and yet, you know, I'll never forget an interview I had with somebody in the very earliest days of this church. I met somebody, and I've never seen that person again, never had this conversation with this person again. But I met a person who had been hanging around with Christians, and this person won't mention the gender or anything like that. He took me aside at one point. We sat down and had an hour talk. This person revealed to me what it hadn't revealed to the Christian friends and so on.

5:08 This person made a lot of money doing sexual favors in a very high-class environment. And this person says, you know, I'm thinking about Christianity. And I said, why? What's brought you to this? And the answer came this way. You know, I know most all of my friends think that Christians are strange people. anybody who invites you to have a personal relationship with Jesus, they think they're all weird. But you know, if you actually watch how they relate to each other, if you spend time, you'll always see some flaky ones, of course. He says, you know, any group's got their flaky people.

5:45 He says, but as a whole, as a rule, if you're honest and you're objective and you can stand what they believe for a while and just be objective and watch, they are, she said, more, there we go, They are, she said, on the whole, more tolerant. On the whole, more tolerant, more kind, basically more open-minded, more patient, less out just to use you.

6:17 And as a result, she said, I've really got to find out a little bit more about what they believe. Now, I wasn't getting a statement that said, boy, it's amazing the quality of the relationships. There must be something to this. Nor was the particular crowd this person was hanging out with. I don't think a group that was just so characterized by love that it was going to turn the world on fire. And yet here was an objective skeptic looking and saying that there is a oneness there. There is a quality to the corporate relationships. that I really can't quite account for, even at that level. And therefore, Jesus says, that is the plausibility structure that I'm giving the world. And what that means, of course, is that, frankly, we who claim to be Christians better look at our relationships. And they see us just using each other like any other corporate body.

7:11 People using each other. They just see birds of a feather flocking together. If they see people just sort of breezing in to get their fix, get what they need, and out again, and no commitment and so on, then they have every right to say, you know, the fantastic claims of Christianity really are fantastic. They're just not tenable. They're not plausible.

7:32 Now, this text tells us two reasons, two reasons for, two grounds for this remarkable oneness that can happen between Christians. The first one we spent a couple weeks looking at, and that was that the blood of Christ brings us near and gives us the same legal position. I just can't recount that at all. I don't have time tonight. It said in the earlier part of the chapter, some people are far and some people are near to God. This is what's so great and radical about the gospel. This is the kind of thing I love, that early part of the chapter. Some people are far from God. That means they're immoral. They're skeptical. They're violent people. Everybody knows they're not religious. They're immoral. And some people are near to God. They're moral. They're decent. They might be religious. They're upstanding. And Paul says, Christ came and preached peace to you who are far away and you who are near, which means that whether you're a good person or a bad person, a moral person or a moral person, you're lost. That every human being on the face of the earth wants to rebel against God, is actually at war with God whether they know it or not, and is simply expressing their rebellion and expressing their rebellion in two different ways.

8:41 Some people express it. Some people keep control of their lives by being very moral. Other people get control of their lives by being very immoral. But it's the same thing. God knows. We're fooled by that. We see some people as far and some people as near. We're all lost. Remember Flannery O'Connor talked about a character. There was a deep, black, nameless conviction that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. the idea there was that a lot of people express their self-mastery i am master of my fate and captain of my soul bloody but unbowed we all feel this way that's the root of our hearts i don't need a savior and some of us express that rebellion by being decent and upstanding so that we don't feel we need a savior and other people express it by being very immoral it doesn't matter we're all lost we're all alienated from god that's the radical gospel that's the beauty of it So it cuts us to the quick.

9:34 And the cross brings us all to God by giving us the same legal standing. Whether you're high or low, whether you're decent or indecent, whether you're moral or immoral, whether you're a goody two-shoes or a high-class prostitute, in Christ you come to the same spot, because apart from Christ you relate to the same spot. So in Christ we legally are brought to the same position. And secondly, Paul says, this union that we have, this unity that Christians have, is that experientially we're given the same experience. And that's what we began to look at last week. One of the things that makes Christians together is they have the same experience. Think of all the movies and plays in which you get a bunch of motley people, a bunch of very, very diverse people who can't get along, but they all go off on a mission together, like the Dirty Dozen, okay, or something like that. You know, there's an awful lot of films that basically have the same plot as the Dirty Dozen.

10:29 A bunch of people, they can't get along, people that traditionally can't get along, but they're all thrown into this situation of danger and they all pull together and they make it through and in the end, you know, they're pals. Well, why? They've all had the same experience. Well, that's just a dim reflection of what Paul's saying here. Paul says there's an experience, a mystical experience, it's called access to God, that Christians share and therefore draws you together regardless of how different you are. Now, let me just say, to finish up what we started last week, we talked a great deal about the word access, won't go into that at all. Tonight I'd just like to say two other things about the need and the nature of this experience. The need for access and the nature for access. Two N's, easy to remember.

11:18 First, the need. I'm going to say this because I realize I'm talking to modern people, people who live in the modern Western civilization. and therefore there's both a need and a danger when I talk about experience. I realized afterwards, you see, what access is is a real experience of God. It's an amazing claim. The great God of the universe, the biblical God. See, the biblical God is the uncreated creator, a personal yet infinite being that's infinitely greater than the universe to whom the stars and the galaxies, you know, are just like grains of dust on a scale, who is uncreated, infinitely transcendent, above all creation. This is the God of the Bible. And the word access means you can have a heart-to-heart knowledge with this one.

12:14 You can have an intimate, personal dealing and relationship with him. That's the claim. You can have mystical oneness, an experience of God. Now, the reason I want to start off by talking about the need that we modern people have for access is just to show you how dangerous it is in our modern context because we're so hungry for it, and we may approach it in the wrong way. You see, there was, without being able to go into much detail on this, in the early part of the 20th century, an awful lot of philosophers and an awful lot of scientists confidently asserted that religion was basically a response in the human soul to fear. that the real reason human beings were religious was because of fear. Now, I can't give you the quotes. They were very condescending.

13:06 They were very naive. And there's very many of them. But people like H.G. Wells, people like Bertrand Russell, people like Aldous Huxley, people like Sigmund Freud, they all had their different twists on it, but they essentially said this. They said the reason that human beings have been so religious for so long is because it was a way for human beings to deal emotionally and psychologically with the overwhelming and confusing and terrifying forces of nature. That the reason human beings were religious was because we were out of control. And if we thought of nature as an impersonal force, then there was nothing we could do about it. Nothing at all. And in the face of diseases and natural disasters, we were helpless. So what we did was we personalized nature by either believing in numbers of deities, you know, the tree god and the water god and the lake god and the jungle god and the sewer god and things like that. Or we believed in one god behind it all.

14:02 In any case, we had to believe there was a way to personally appease and deal with the forces of nature. Ah, but in the early part of the 20th century, the latter part of the 19th century, again and again you hear people saying, leading philosophers and thinkers have said, through science, through empirical investigation, we're getting rid of the fearsomeness of nature. We're coming to see that we can control nature. We're coming to strip nature of its mystery. And because of that, you're going to see that as science advances, as we become less and less afraid of nature, and as we are more and more able to control nature, make it do what we want it to do, religion is going to wane. Oh, look, they say. Look and notice how the more scientific a society gets, the more religion and superstition and all that seems to go down, the more it goes down. And that's the belief.

14:57 And therefore, they all predicted that the more technology and science went ahead in Western civilization, over the next 50 years, they said, you're going to see religion go down and down and down. What little is left will not believe in the supernatural at all. It will become very philosophical, sort of ethical. Thomas Jefferson believed, for example, now this goes way back even further, but Thomas Jefferson truly believed that 40 or 50 years from the time that he was writing, which was, you know, in the early 1800s, that essentially everybody in the country would be a Unitarian. That's what he said. He says, we're basically religion, as we know it, is going to die out, and people are simply going to believe in science and rationality, and they're going to desupernaturalize the idea, they're not going to believe that Jesus is God, they're not going to believe in all these sorts of things. Something happened. Something went wrong. you see the more technology advanced this is what went wrong as technology advanced people became to see more and more that the real things that make us unhappy technology couldn't get to there's at least three things we can mention we all have a tell it need that means we need to know what we're living for we need to have meaning in life we also have social needs we need to find and keep love it's not enough to find it you want to keep it and how do we do that?

16:17 We also have moral needs. We need to know what is right and what is wrong. And science, you see, in the early days, it almost, for a good while, there were scientific disciplines like psychology and sociology that insisted that on the basis of empirical investigation we would be able to help people meet those needs. You just do not have thoughtful scientists saying that anymore. You just don't have them saying that. They realize that empirical investigation can't even define love. Now, there's some people who still insist on it. But this is what's happened. Just the other day, I don't even know which talk show I saw it on, but briefly I was going through and I saw a guy. He was a psychiatrist and he was an M.D. And he said, I just saw three minutes, get this, he says, he says, we haven't quite isolated it, but we're getting down to the place where we're going to be able to define love. Love is one or two chemicals in our neurosystem. and we're on the verge of a breakthrough, he said, because when we can identify those things, finally, see, here's the spirit of technology, finally, we will be back in control of ourselves, because, he says, you know, with all of how science has tamed the viruses and tamed all these things, science hasn't been able to tame the emotions, but we're ready to, because all love is is the influence, on our mind, of a couple of chemicals in our neurosystem, and when we can identify them, we'll finally be in control.

17:37 You won't be able, you won't have to fall in love with anybody anymore who you don't want to fall in love with. He says you'll be able to only fall in love with people, you'll be able to identify the people who are feasible to be in love with. And not only will you be able to be feasible, but you'll also be able to control how much in love you are so you won't do stupid things. and he says you're going to be able to be in love when you want to to the degree and with whom you want what was the response to the audience what do you think the response the audience was just like that you know it was a completely visceral response the fact is that it's not a very scientific view at all on the other hand they didn't know that all they knew was they hated

20:05 Because, you see, the spirit of technology says everything can be reduced to commodity. Everything can be controlled. Everything can be abstracted out so that we can move it around and so we can use it. Everything can be turned into a product. I can help you find meaning if you push these buttons. If you read this book, Five Easy Steps. I can help you fall in love to the degree you want to fall in love if I could just isolate these one or two chemicals. And there is something inside human beings that has not gone away the more that talk goes on. Instead, there's a feeling of violence. I'm being violated. I'm more than a chemical bag of chemicals. Meaning is more than a bag of chemicals. Love is more than a bag of chemicals. And what's happened? The thinkers who said religion is simply a response to fear have been proven totally wrong.

21:02 To everybody's shock, religion in our modern Western society is on the rise. All kinds of religions, every kind of religion. As G.K. Chesterton says, when people stop believing in God, the biblical God, they don't believe in nothing. He says they believe in everything. What happens is, when they got rid of the classic Christian religion, which was totally against the spirit of technology in many ways. And in place, we found out, instead of people losing their religious impulses, these religious impulses were not based in fear. Because the less and less people have anything to fear, the less and less there's any mystery left, the more and more people still feel like, I am more than a bag of chemicals. There's got to be more than this. A perfect example of how things didn't go the way the expert said is Aldous Huxley himself, the one who wrote Brave New World.

21:56 in the early part of the century in the 1920s and 1930s he basically taught that eventually religion would die out and we would be able essentially through science and empirical investigation to meet all of our needs by the time he was in his by the 1950s and of course he committed suicide in 1963 by taking an overdose of LSD he had become a Buddhist a practicing Buddhist and he said the only way we're going to get people to stop destroying themselves, the only way we're going to stop destroying each other, the only way that there is any hope for humanity, he said, is through mysticism. Because he realized that we were a great, a human being is a greater totality than he'd thought. More than just an intellect, more than just a body, we cry out for the unseen. And one of the real questions that a lot of these original thinkers should ask, but they're all dead, they're gone, and nobody's asking it, is if there is no God, if there is no unseen world, if there is no supernatural world, then the only way to really explain religion and the religious impulse is the idea of fear, fear of nature.

23:08 Okay, that's gone pretty much. Now what do we do? How do you explain our inveterate religiousness? Now having said all that, here's what's so dangerous. People are going back and flocking more and more and they want access. They want experience. They know just what Huxley has said, and that is there's more to me than what I thought. I'm crying out for the unseen. There's got to be a meaning beyond commodity. There's got to be a meaning beyond possessions. There's got to be a meaning beyond the material. Well, what is it? Where is it? But here's the danger. We have been modernized. In that, we like technology. We like being able to push buttons, and we like to make things into commodity. And so, so many people who are going back to everything, I mean, people are inventing religions in their backyard.

24:02 People are doing anything they can because they want experience. Many of them come back into the church. But look at them. In fact, I should say, look at yourselves. Watch out that you don't want an experience of God that's just a commodity. I'm going to put it to you this way. Sex is a commodity today. 300 years ago, the problem with sex was you couldn't use it as a commodity because sex went along with a lot of other things. Sex went along with marriage, with family. It was difficult to avoid having sex and having children. It was very difficult to avoid. We can do that now through technology, but what that meant was, back then, sex was not something you could abstract from commitment. Sex was a great feeling. Sex was an intimacy, but you couldn't make it a commodity because you couldn't abstract the thing away from commitment and responsibility to building a family and getting to know somebody.

24:59 You couldn't do it. Now we do. We've learned, through technology, we've learned to be able to have sex without really having those, what we call, consequences. But what it means is we've turned sex into a commodity. The great danger is, I know this, because when I preach on this, when I teach on this, people get hungry. They say, I want an experience of God. I need it. There's an emptiness in me. I want love. I'm crying out for the unseen. You know, more and more people are realizing what Huxley says is right, basically, and that is there's no hope.

25:30 There's no hope except through the unseen world. But people come back and they want God as a commodity. In other words, let me be mean about this. Let me be very stark about it. They want to sleep with God, but they don't want to be married to God. see they want the they want the experience of intimacy with him but as soon as you say now in classic Christian teaching if you want to have this great experience of God you've got to believe what the Bible says there's doctrine you see you know the deity of Jesus Christ and one person with two natures he's human and divine and the doctrine of the atonement he died on the cross and some people say oh I can't believe all those superstitions I just want an experience of God or you can talk to people about the fact that if you want to know God you've got to make yourself completely committed to him you've got to obey the ten commandments you've got to say I will obey the ten commandments I will do the ten commandments I no longer am in charge of my own life oh well you see that doesn't go over so big with modern people who in the spirit of the technological age have learned to see everything as commodity everything becomes a product everything is something I can manipulate they want an experience of God but many many people will not come into Christianity they'll go into some other homemade religion because homemade religions watch very carefully are unbelievably technological in spite of the fact they say oh we're going to get beyond science we're going to give you mystical oneness look at the various look at the zillions of various new age derivatives there's never ever ever any obedience in them you never have to obey anything look and read the books Watch the cable TV shows.

27:19 All they're talking about is now, you know, you've got to think in this way, you've got to be authentic in this way, you've got to get rid of your fears, you've got to let go of this, you've got to channel, you've got to let the energy come through. Where do they say you cannot? You've got to forgive people. You can't just sleep around with everybody. You've got to tell the truth. You've got to submit. Oh my gosh, who wants that? because, you see, I want to sleep with God without being married to God. I want an experience of God without having to submit to him intellectually and submit to him personally and submit to him totally and exclusively.

27:59 That's what's so dangerous about talking about experience. I tell you, through Jesus Christ, you can know God personally. You can know him intimately. You can have heart-to-heart sense of his love on your life. don't you want that i know you want that because you're modern people and you're starved for it you're alienated people we are we're lonely people we don't have the intimacy with each other that people used to have we don't have we don't have the solid families that we used to have we don't have the uh we don't have the intimacy we're we're we're islands and we desperately are calling out to be touched and so as soon as we talk about this the most incredible thing about the Christian faith is this it avoids the danger and the mistake of the western faith the western religion the problem with western culture is it believes that religion truth can be known through the rationality it can be learned mainly through cognition and the mistake of eastern religions and eastern culture is they say truth cannot be known through cognition.

29:08 You know, in Zen Buddhism, one of the things that you have to meditate on is koans. You know what koans are? Things like, what is the sound of one hand clapping? See, a koan is designed to frustrate your reason. And of course, many people now go that way. Eastern culture has always said, you can't know doctrine. It's silly to talk about the difference between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, right doctrine and heresy. That's ridiculous. Truth is beyond all these things. truth is beyond rationality. You know, you can't, but the trouble is you can't say that without using rationality. You can't say truth is beyond the difference between orthodoxy and heresy. If you say I disagree, they'll say that's a heresy. I mean, in other words, you can't deny rationality without using it. It just doesn't work. Christianity, Christianity refuses. It's really not an Eastern or a Western religion. Have you ever noticed that?

30:00 God was extremely interested and interesting in where he put all of the main incidents of redemptive history right on the border between the West and the East. Right on the border between what? You know, between Europe, between Africa, and between Asia. See, was Jesus an Easterner, a Westerner? Or was he? Do you see? The fact of the matter is, Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, you will worship me in spirit and truth. Christianity means you've got to believe you've got to obey you've got to think it out and you've got to submit your intellect and you've got to submit your will to him but Christianity is also a deep mystical oneness with God himself so beware how you come after it you can't have this experience of God without giving yourself to him beware because you're coming in we all, all of us, including me, certainly I mean, I see it in myself all the time.

31:02 We want commodity. I would like three pounds of God, please. not so much that it disturbs my life, not so much that it really upends my goals, not so much that it's going to really affect who I marry, who I date, not so much that it's really going to affect how I get things done, how I work at my business, not so much that it's going to make me give away an awful lot of my money to an awful lot of other causes so that I'm not going to be able to have as high a lifestyle as I want. I would just like three pounds of God, please.

31:43 Not so much that it's really going to disturb me, just enough to get me over the humps. I'm sorry. It's going to disturb you if you want it. You can't have three pounds of God because God's a person. You can't have three pounds of Tim Keller. You get all of me or none. You can't say, come in, Tim, stay out of Keller. I'll say, huh? What? What is this? You can't do this. You can't abstract. You can't make these abstract distinctions. We've done it to the family. We've done it in all these other areas. You won't do it now. You can't do it now. You won't be a Westerner or an Easterner if you come to Christ.

32:24 And one last thing, and as you can tell, I didn't actually get into the nature of access, so I forgot something to say next week. But, Let me just point this thing out. When I talk about the difference between West and East, I can close up with this. You know, one of the reasons why ministers, we pass books around each other, and that's the reason why we all sound alike.

32:56 Jeff White and I, when reading about Pascal, the great French philosopher, He was a man who really was, at least intellectually, a Christian for years. Intellectually, he was a Christian for a long time. He believed it. He believed it. He was a brilliant man, and a tremendously rational man. He was actually the inventor of the computer, you know, and the inventor of the calculator, and he was one of the greatest minds of all time, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. The last few years of his life, something changed him. He had a formal kind of Christianity, because he was a classic Westerner. He believed in truth and he had it all worked out, but he didn't have access. when he died, some of you may have heard of this, it's very interesting, when he died, someone found, sewed into his coat,

33:48 a parchment, a journal, it was a piece out of a journal, he'd had an experience, that moved him forever, from being just a westerner, and certainly not an easterner, but into being, into full body Christian experience, he'd gotten access one night, to change his life forever, and he really became a Christian. And what he did was he wrote down everything that he experienced that night, and it was so precious to him so that he never forgot what kind of access you could have. He wrote it down, put it into a kind of amulet, and he sewed it inside his shirt, not his coat. So he took around with him all the time. When he died, it was brought out, and this is what it said. It was written this way. This day of grace, 1654, from about half past ten at night to about half after midnight. Then one line, fire.

34:42 God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and of the wise. Security, security, feeling, joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ, thy God shall be my God. Forgetfulness of the world and of all save God. He can be found only in the ways taught in the gospel. Greatness, greatness of the human soul. Greatness, O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee, but I have known thee. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. I have separated myself from him. My God, why hast thou forsaken me? That I be not separated from thee eternally. This is life eternal. That they might know thee, the only true God, and him whom thou hast sent. This is life eternal. that they might know thee, the only true God and him whom thou hast sent. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.

35:39 I've separated myself from him. I fled him. I renounced him. I crucified him. May I never again be separated from him. He maintains himself in me only in the ways taught in the gospel. Oh, renunciation, total and sweet. What happened to him? He got access. Big shock.

36:02 Not the sound of one hand clapping. Not something he couldn't talk about. Not some mystical thing. Not some anti-doctrinal thing. Not getting beyond truth. Not the God of the philosophers. Not the goddess of the wise. Not the abstractions of the philosophers. God of Abraham. God of Isaac. God of Jacob. Fire. That's what Christianity is about.

36:26 Let's pray. Our great God, We thank you that you're a God who can be known. It's almost inexpressible. It's almost too much. And yet we thank you that you offer this to us. Tonight all we've done in many ways is just think about our need for you. Just think about our need for access. Would you make us this, oh Father? I don't just pray for individuals, though I pray for that. I pray that everybody in this room might know you, not just know about you. that everybody in this room might have access to the Father through Jesus Christ, by the Spirit. What I really ask is that we might become a community of people who have access, so that when people come into our services, when people come into our midst, they sense a presence. Not the God of the philosophers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob. Fire.

37:20 Would you make us a community like that? So when people come on in, they sense that God is here and they fall down and the secrets of their hearts are revealed and they realize that God is present among us would you be a God to us like that? we need it but we would not ask simply to have the experience without giving ourselves to you intellectually, volitionally, personally in every way we do that now and we ask for this access only through Jesus and in the spirit it's in Jesus name we pray Amen.