“We don’t have to be the majority (we never have been) but our spiritual impact is so powerful. Paul
says, ‘As unknown and yet well-known,’ and that’s the way we are, but when that’s
so diminished we come to the place where there’s no ability to affect the
culture.”
A basic sociological truth says that
within any group of people, large or small, 10% of the people of the
organization (institution, movement, religion, cult, body, etc.) thoroughly
committed to one idea, can control the whole organization and carry it in the
direction of that ideal.
“In the business world you hear about
the 80-20 rule (80% of your business comes from 20% of the activity), but the
rule of social movement is all you have to have is 10% committed to something
to control it,” says Jordan. “I say that because if you have 10% of the populace that is committed to the truth, you can influence it.
By the way, when 10% of the populace becomes Muslim, are they not
thoroughly committed to what they do?
“You watch what’s happening in
Europe today and you’re just seeing a foretaste.
*****
“The things that hold a culture
together have long been dissolved here in the United States and now you have a
generation of people with no understanding of what our culture is about.
“There’s a revisionist kind of idea
and even the simple cultural foundations, and the understanding that carries our
culture along, is gone and generations have come along who’ve had that educated
out of them. Those people are now taking the control reins of culture.
“People in the 40-60 age group are
the people who control the power stroke in a culture. You’ve got these folks
who in their 30s now who’ve been completely educated out of any understanding
of what made America or Western culture the way it is.
“I’ve told you before about meeting
the attorney in Chicago, a graduate of a big law school who practices in a big
law firm, and we were talking about the Good Samaritan Law and I asked him if
he had any idea where that name came from. He said ‘no’ and when I told him it
came out of the Bible, he said, ‘No, that’s not possible. That’s not right.
Separation of church and state; you can’t do that.’
“Here’s a young guy, thoroughly
educated, who didn’t know what the Parable of the Good Samaritan was. I mean,
you don’t have to be a Believer; you just understand there’s certain things
like David and Goliath and Noah and the Ark that are metaphors a culture uses
to pass on its values and the things that underpin its thinking.
“You ever hear people say, ‘We just
study the Bible as literature; not as a religious thing’? That’s what they’re
talking about. There was a time in the not too distant past where you were
considered not to be properly educated if you didn’t have a working knowledge
of the King James Bible.
*****
“I was fascinated back at the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, a number of
professors at universities, including literature experts, wrote books about the
social-cultural impact of it. They understand that our language, many of the
phrases you and I use just naturally, come right out of your Bible.
“That’s because it’s been a cultural
underpinning, but that’s being done away with and you have generations of young
people now who’ve been educated without any of that attachment. So as they
begin to take control what takes the place of the Scripture is paganism.
“Paganism is a religious philosophy
all the religions of the world focus in. The Bible says there’s God and there’s
man, but paganism says, ‘No, there’s only one bucket; it’s all just the same.’
"When you have God and man, you have the master-servant, Lord and man--absolutes that mean there’s a right and wrong. There’s someone to define what a marriage is, define what life is, define what good is, define what evil is and so forth.
“We use all these fancy terms like
‘multiculturalism’ and ‘relativism’ and all that, but all that is in its
ultimate form is just an expression of paganism.
*****
Here's a related article:
By II Timothy, Paul had ministered all across Asia into Europe all the way to Rome, planning churches in tremendously diverse cultures, but this is where the reader sees the church move from rule to ruin.
In his parting message to Timothy, Paul writes in II Timothy 4: “For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”
Jordan explains, “Paul tells you what his course is in Acts 20:24 when he writes, ‘But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God.’
“That last part of the verse has always kind of tickled my fancy. You know, when you read Paul’s life, that verse helps you understand it. He lived like he had a suicide mania.
“If you look at Acts 14, he goes into a city and they drag him outside of town, stone him and leave him for dead. But he gets right back up and you know what he does? He goes right back into the city.
“You say, ‘No, wait a minute, what kind of deal is that?!’ You check the record; up until that point every time a city rejected Paul he shook the dust off his feet and went on to the next one.
“But now here’s one where he goes in, they drag him out, stone him and leave him for dead and God resurrects him. I believe he died and God resurrected him. That’s the experience he talks about in II Corinthians 12.
“Paul gets up and says, ‘You know, I’ve been up there in paradise and seen some things that I can’t even tell people about. It was so wonderful I’d like to go back. I’ll go back into the city and maybe they’ll . . . ’
“From then on he lived like he had a suicide mania. He would just go right into the mouths of the lions. In fact, here he talks about being delivered out of the mouth of the lion.
“The guy had this concept of holding on loosely to earth. When he says, ‘Neither count I my life dear to myself,’ he didn’t say he didn’t love his family, or that he was trying to die tomorrow. He said, ‘I’m holding it loose. The most precious things to me are not what I possess here.’
“When you talk about persecution, or someone coming along and taking what I’ve got, beating me up, putting me in jail, or being shipwrecked time and time again . . .
“Read II Corinthians about all the stuff he went through. They did all that stuff to Paul and you think, ‘Goodnight, I’d have quit about the second verse!’
“But he says, ‘I’m not just going to finish the job, I’m going to do it WITH JOY.’ Those two words changed that verse for me. He’s saying, ‘I’m not just going to endure, I’ve got a joy in this!’
*****
“Where do you get the joy? I’ve told people for years that a verse of Scripture that changed my whole life and my whole ministry many years ago was the last verse in II Corinthians 1: ‘Not for that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for by faith ye stand.’
“I can remember like it was this morning the Sunday morning when that verse changed my life. I saw that my job is to help you rejoice in the Lord. How do you do that?
“When you get a gift, do you go, ‘Aghhh, I got another gift. I don’t know what to do with this. Pffft.’
“If I can communicate to you the gift grace has provided, it’ll produce the joy. In Colossians 2:7, Paul talks about being ‘rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving.’
“Thanksgiving comes as a natural response to being grounded in an understanding of what it means to be rooted and built up in Christ. The Christian life is a lifelong growing in maturity in Christlikeness, where the character of the Lord Jesus Christ reveals itself out through us over a lifetime of spiritual growth.
“Folks, if it isn’t your faith . . . if you’re going to ‘walk by faith and not be sight,’ it has to be that. So when Paul says, ‘I kept the faith,’ that’s what he’s talking about.
“He says, ‘I finished my course,’ meaning, ‘I took the job God gave me and I finished it.’ The course was the ministry God had given him. When you finish the course, you keep the faith.
*****
“I Corinthians 16:13 is a verse people like to complain about that to me has always been kind of helpful. It says, ‘Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.’
“People say, ‘Well, what does it mean to quit you like men?’ How does a man quit? A man quits when the job’s done.
“I ran track when I was in high school. You know the race was never finished until the finish line? I ran a 440 relay. You’d run your leg, pass the baton to the next guy. My leg was done but the race wasn’t done. You know how a man quits? When he passes the finish line.
“ ‘The greatest ability is dependability,’ some wise man said. When you finish . . . Did you see Alabama win the national championship the other day? That was as good a game as you’re ever going to see.
“If you watched the Alabama players, they had headbands with the word ‘FINISH’ on them. The coach, Nick Saban, his whole philosophy is ‘FINISH.’ Finish every play, every assignment, every game.
“If you just go do your job and finish, win, lose, or draw, you did what you were supposed to do. ‘Quit ye like men.’ Don’t quit with two minutes left in the game. That’s quitting like a girly-man. The MAN is the one who quits at the end.”
*****
Here’s another related post:
From II Corinthians 12 we know that the Apostle Paul died and came back to life.
Paul talks about how, “I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.”
Jordan says, “My own private, personal, subjective opinion is that’s talking about Paul, and the encounter where that took place is right there in Acts.”
Specifically, Acts 14:19 says, “And there came thither certain Jews from Antioch and Iconium, who persuaded the people, and, having stoned Paul, drew him out of the city, supposing he had been dead.”
Jordan goes on, “So, at Lystra Paul’s dragged out of town after having a ministry and preaching. Verse 20 says, ‘Howbeit, as the disciples stood round about him, he rose up, and came into the city: and the next day he departed with Barnabas to Derbe.’
“Now when somebody rises up—he’s been stoned to death and he rose up! What just happened?! If he died, what happened to him when he rose up? He’s resurrected! There’s a miracle that takes place. That shouldn’t surprise you because there are miracles that took place all through this chapter.
“By the way, he rises up, came into the city, and the next day he departed with Barnabas to Derbe. That’s a 20-mile walk from Lystra! If you were stoned to death with stones . . . if someone took brick bats and stones and whacked you in the head long enough they thought you were dead, I don’t think you’re just going to get up and walk 20 miles the next day! Unless something miraculous happened!
“Verse 21 says, ‘And when they had preached the gospel to that city, and had taught many, they returned again to Lystra, and to Iconium, and Antioch.’
“Timothy got saved right in the middle of some real interesting ministry. You follow Paul’s ministry through the Book of Acts and you’ll find something radically changed at this point. Up until this point, Paul would go into a city and people would reject him and he would just leave.
“From here on out, though, they reject him and you know what he does? He just goes right back at them! A guy once said, ‘He acted like he had a death wish from here on out.’
“Now, I don’t know about you, but if you got caught up into the third heaven and saw things that weren’t lawful for you to utter, and the Lord says, ‘Okay, you’re going back,’ and you got back down here, how long would you want to stay down here and not go back up there?
“I don’t think Paul gained that opinion in Philippians 1 in the jail in Rome. I think he had that opinion from the time of Acts 14. He lived with such reckless abandon all through his ministry from there on out. And Timothy cut his spiritual teeth on that kind of exciting dynamic ministry. Must have been an impressive time to have been around the work of the ministry.
“Timothy was there when the gospel would go into a community that had never heard the name of Christ. They didn’t have advance billing. None of them had ever heard the message Paul’s preaching. And he goes in and preaches the gospel and sees people get saved. Then he sees those saved people begin to get together and study the Word of God. He edifies them in a specific manner.
“When he tells Timothy that thing about ‘godly edifying,’ Timothy had experienced that and knew exactly what he was talking about and Timothy came out of the kind of ministry where that was the norm.
“By the time Paul’s gone, apostasy set into all of that. All of that had been co-opted into ChristenDUM. It had been co-opted into a religious system that took the truth and mixed it back into kingdom truth; got rid of right division. Mixed law and grace and produced death in the pot. But Tim was there when it all started.
*****
“When you look at II Timothy, you see Paul didn’t give any one way (established churches) had to look. He said, ‘Here’s truth, now you go wisely and maturely structure it the way you live.’
“You remember Romans 15 where he says to the Romans, ‘I’m in Macedonia and when I leave here to go to Spain I’m going to stop and preach there to you.’
"Paul had some plans! I think he did get to Spain and it would have taken another two-year span, at least, so what you’re seeing is Paul traveling. Now eventually he’s put back in prison and that’s when he writes II Timothy at the end.
“When he wrote I Timothy, he was writing after he left Timothy in Ephesus when he went around furthering that trip. He’s writing it at a point where they’ve both been in prison and now they’re out and Paul’s gone on to do some other things and then he writes back to Timothy, ‘Let me encourage you to keep that ministry going.’
“You see how he says in Verse 2, ‘Unto Timothy, my own son in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord’?
"Timothy was a convert of the Apostle Paul. In II Timothy Paul says it a little differently: ‘To Timothy, my dearly beloved son: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.’ When he says ‘my own son,’ he’s saying in essence, ‘You’re one that I introduced to the Lord. You’re the fruit of my ministry.’
“Timothy first shows up in the Bible in Acts 16. Paul’s been to Derbe and Lystra before, but when he comes back there to minister and establish the saints, confirming the churches there, Timothy is there. Verse 2 says, ‘Which was well reported of by the brethren that were at Lystra and Iconium.’
“There are churches in two different cities that say, ‘Paul, this Timothy kid, he’s really making head way!’ and they recommend him to the Apostle Paul and Paul begins to take notice of him as far as ministry is concerned and this is when he circumcises Timothy and begins to take Timothy with him in the ministry.
*****
Here’s yet another post on the subject:
Acts 14:21 says, "And when they had preached the gospel to that city, and had taught many, they returned again to Lystra, and to Iconium, and Antioch."
“Paul preached in Derbe and then Lystra, Iconium and Antioch, to confirm the souls and to establish the structure for the local church. Notice the first place he went back to was Lystra.
“If you look at verse 8, it says there was a certain man at Lystra, and what happens in Lystra is in verses 9-18. Verse 19 says, ‘And there came thither certain Jews from Antioch and Iconium, who persuaded the people, and, having stoned Paul, drew him out of the city, supposing he had been dead.’
“My own personal, private, subjective, individual opinion is that Paul was stoned to death. Nobody drug him out thinking he was dead that wanted him dead that didn’t check a pulse. Their estimation of stoning Paul was that they killed him.
“Verse 20 says, ‘Howbeit, as the disciples stood round about him, he rose up, and came into the city: and the next day he departed with Barnabas to Derbe.’
“I would take it that they killed him and God raised him from the dead. That’s the point in time, it seems to me, where, in II Corinthians 12, Paul talks about how, ‘I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.
[3] And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;)
[4] How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.’
“My point to you is, where did that happen? It happened in Lystra. In Lystra, they got so mad at Paul that they killed him, yet they didn’t kill him. They thought they did; they stoned him and that’s bad enough.
*****
“You ever had anybody stone you? Can you imagine the headache that would have been? Years ago, I was on a golf course and heard a ‘WHACK!’ I looked up and saw a golf ball coming right toward me. You ever had one of those moments when you see it and you know it’s going to be bad but you can’t move?
“I watched that golf ball coming toward my head and I could actually see the dimples in it as it spun and hit me right square in the noggin. Next thing I knew I was on my back, looking up at the clouds in the noon-day sky. There were stars everywhere I looked; light flashes all around my eyes as I sat there in a daze. A big, old goose egg came up on my forehead and that was just one little golf ball.
“Paul was stoned; he didn’t have pebbles thrown at him. They thought to kill the dude.
“Now, I went away from that golf course with a headache and a minor concussion. No broken bones. My point to you is, what did he experience at Lystra? It wasn’t good. So what does he do?
“He goes right back into that city where they just tried to kill him! It was so important to him that they get a local church properly established at Lystra that he was willing to risk his life.
*****
“Establishing a church wasn’t just a, ‘Well, you know, when I’m retired, I think I’ll do this.’ For Paul, it was a life or death situation. It was that critically important to the work of the ministry.
“Come to Ephesians 3 and see why that local assembly is so important to Paul. The churches of the Gentiles—where do you think Paul got the idea that it was that important? Where’d he get his ideas for what the ministry was? The preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery. Christ gave him instructions for what the work of the ministry was to be about.
“When he established churches of the Gentiles, that’s what he was doing in Acts 14.
“By the way, when he went into every city, he went into Thessalonica in Acts 17 and established a local church; a church of the Gentiles. Then, in Acts 18, he went over to Corinth and established a church of the Gentiles. Then he went to Ephesus in Acts 19 and established a church of the Gentiles.
“In Acts 13 and 14, he established churches (plural) of the Gentiles. But you know what he did to those churches in Acts? He wrote to them about the churches of Galatia. He wrote two letters to Thessalonica. He wrote two letters to the Corinthians. He wrote the letter of Ephesians and I Timothy to the assembly and Timothy there in Ephesus.
“Then he says over in Colossians that he got this dispensation of God to fulfill the Word of God. But in connection with fulfilling and completing God’s Word . . .”