An inward understanding

Tonight at church, Jordan recalled an old saying: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

He explains, “The idea is you always need to keep some people in your life who are ahead of you. The way to become a leader in any area of life is to become a follower. Look around for somebody and find, ‘Where can they be my leader?’

“You’re teaching them how to be a follower by following their lead. When it comes time for your area of leadership, you know what they’ll all do? They’ll follow you.

“Leadership is not something you demand or something you command from people; it’s something you earn by demonstrating largely how it is to be a follower. And let them be responsible. You’ve heard me say for 30 years, ‘I don’t care who makes the decisions as long as they’re responsible for them.’ ”

“When you’re in an assembly of people, there are some people you can be their leader and there are people you can be a follower of and teach them to be a leader. It’s that ‘body life’; every part supplies to the good of the whole.

“You wouldn’t want everybody to be right at the same level all the time because then there could never be any real growth unless you had just one person out there ahead of everybody who becomes functionally the pope for the group and that’s not a good thing.”

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What the Book of the Revelation is all about is the revelation of Jesus Christ that God the Father gave to Him from heaven with His mighty angels.

Jordan says, “It’s a fascinating thing: there are no genuine atheists. Romans 1:18-19. Notice they’re not holding the truth in a manner in which to believe it and to enhance it. They’re holding the truth in unrighteousness. These are not people who are going to deal honestly with truth; they’re going to pervert it.

“God built you in such a way that you know there’s a God. He manifested that. God has put in His creation a knowledge, an inward understanding that there’s a personal, individual relationship that you were designed to have with your Creator. It’s witnessed by creation out here; the things that are seen evidence that to the point that men are without excuse.

“They know two things: they know there’s a God (His eternal power and His godhead) and they know they’re going to face Him in judgment and they’re without excuse. There’s no person who reaches the age of personal accountability for himself who doesn’t know that because God put that there and that’s what the age of accountability is all about. It’s coming to that realization and that consciousness.

“As Psalm 14 says it, ‘The fool has said in his heart there is no God.' How’d he get there? He didn’t start out there. He didn’t start out as someone who didn’t believe in God.

“Richard Dawkins, for example, talks about how he gave up on the idea of God. He knew there was a God but there was some things that happened that he got mad at God, and rather than glorifying Him as God and being thankful to Him, he became vain in his imaginations and he talks about that in Ben Stein's documentary!

“Dawkins didn't know it but what he was doing in Ben Stein’s movie, when he talked about giving up on God and developing this rational alibi system to not believe in God, he was describing what Paul two thousand years ago wrote as a biography of the guy! You say, ‘Whoa, that’s pretty good!’

“So when you come over to II Thessalonians where it says God’s going to ‘take vengeance on them who know not God,’ this isn’t people who never could of possibly heard, known or didn’t know anything about it, sitting off in a dark closet with the light off and had no hope of ever knowing about God. These are people who have willfully kept themselves completely ignorant. They had a knowledge and they rejected it.

“There’s often the question, ‘What about people who don’t know?’ I remember back in the ‘70s I was out knocking on doors, trying to share the gospel with people, when a postman came up to me and asked, ‘What about the heathen who don’t know? Where do they go?’

“People think about ‘the heathen’ as being off in the darkest Brazil, or Africa, or the remote rain forest somewhere. You rub shoulders with the heathen right down at Walgreens and Sears. You don’t know what they know.

“In Moody’s science films they’ve got a great old movie where they trace some of these tribal regions in Africa that, when Europeans came in contact with them in the 17 and 1800s, they were in dark savagery and Moody went back and traced the lineage of some of these tribes into more ancient times and discovered that these people a thousand years before had light and knowledge; they had associations with truth but they rejected it!

“What happens with light rejected is it becomes lightning and so you don’t know where those people have been because you haven’t been there. You aren’t God and you aren’t accountable for them. But you know how they got there—by holding the truth (the truth God put within them) in unrighteousness.

“The Scripture’s real clear in Romans 2 that if you walk in the light you have, no matter how dim the light is, it will give you light.”