The Impact of Rousseau and the Essence of Human Connection

SPEAKER 01 : 0:00

So God created man in his own image. In the image of God created he him. Male and female created he them. Now you all know that verse by heart, don’t you? You could have cited it. I didn’t need to give you a reference. You don’t need to look it up. You know that that’s there and you know what it says. But there may be something that lies unnoticed here. although it is crucial to the story. It is crucial to everything that follows in the Bible, and yet it seems to be overlooked by many people. God said also, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a help meet for him. All right? Now we understand he actually made them in his image… Male and female. And this is important for us to understand. On the day of creation, though, on the sixth day, God created something else. He created a relationship. It was a relationship which, and make no mistake about this, the relationship between Adam and Eve was not merely the natural thing that happens when you have a man and a woman together with no clothes on alone. It was a deliberate creation on God’s part of a relationship, and the relationship was in His image, just as man and woman were in His image. It didn’t fall out, as I said, as a result of man and woman. It wasn’t just a property of nature. It wasn’t just something that took place. It was deliberate. And in this formulation… And this sermon is not about marriage. We know these things almost intuitively, but it isn’t always easy to express them. Solomon found a way. He said in Ecclesiastes, it’s in the fourth chapter, verse 9, Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him that is alone when he falls. He has not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, they’ll have heat. But how can a person get warm by himself? And if one prevails against him, two shall withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Now this is so obvious, so true, not only in the Bible but in our own experience, in our own lives, that you would think that it would transcend all argument. You would be wrong. It doesn’t transcend all argument. In the 18th century, there was a Swiss-born French philosopher named Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I’d say there’s a pretty good chance if you’ve read very much about history, about European history, if you’ve read very much about political history, you have heard of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He actually was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of a period of time called the Enlightenment. If you’ve read very much, you’ve heard of him, and usually you have heard of him in the best of terms. He is kind of a person who established some of the ideas upon which our own democracy has developed. But ideas have consequences, and many of Rousseau’s ideas are still producing a lot of mischief right here in the 21st century. I’m indebted to Nancy Piercy and her book, Total Truth, for some new insights to me in Rousseau’s theory of man. She said this, and I quote, Rousseau said the way to grasp the essence of human nature was to hypothesize what we would be like if we were stripped of all social relationships, morals, laws, customs, and traditions, even of civilization itself, to imagine what we would be like. This original pre-social condition he called the state of nature. In it, all that exist are lone, disconnected, autonomous individuals, whose sole motivation force is the desire for self-preservation, what Rousseau called self-love. Amour de soi, I think it is in French. If you are taking notes, I want you to take special note of what Rousseau calls the original condition of man. He calls it the state of nature. You will occasionally come across this phrase in different historical or particularly in political history writings, and you need to know where it comes from and what lies with it. Also take special note of the image of man as a lone, disconnected, autonomous creature whose sole motivating force… Ms. Piercy asks, What did that mean for Rousseau’s view of society? If our true nature is to be autonomous individuals, then society is contrary to our nature. It is artificial. It is confining. It’s oppressive. For Rousseau, the really oppressive relationships were personal ones, like marriage, family, church, even the workplace. And this explains why it was so revolutionary when Rousseau proposed that individuals are the sole ultimate reality. In a way, you kind of like the idea of rugged individualism, don’t you? It may have partly its roots in Rousseau. He denounced civilization with its social conventions as artificial and as oppressive. Now, if you’re taking notes again, don’t miss this phrase. You need to understand it. He says individuals are the sole ultimate reality. Not the family, not male and female, and not marriage, not any of these things. The individual alone. Note it well. Now, God created man in his own image, male and female. And since God is a family… He created man in family. Follow me? I’ll say it again for you. Since God is a family, he created man in family. But back to Rousseau for a further moment. What did he say liberated man from the oppression of family, marriage, church, and workplace? Now, think that over for a minute, would you? We’re talking about man who is oppressed by church, family, marriage, by society, even by civilization itself. What liberates man, do you imagine, in Rousseau’s view from all these things? Now fasten your seatbelt. I don’t want you to get whiplash on this. Rousseau said it was the state that liberated man. The state would destroy all social ties, releasing the individual to loyalty to anything except itself. Rousseau spelled out his vision with startling clarity. He said, and I quote, each citizen would then be completely independent of all his fellow man and absolutely dependent upon the state. When I read that, I nearly fell out of my chair. How in the world you can move from all this social oppression we’re talking about and be liberated from all this by the state was clean beyond anything I could possibly put together, but that is precisely what the man said. Nancy Peercy’s observation was, no wonder his philosophy inspired so many totalitarian systems, which it did. Robespierre and the French Revolution, Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, all these people, even Pol Pot, who massacred a quarter of the population of Cambodia, was educated in Paris and read his Rousseau. This man’s thoughts have led to some of the most murderous events, to really the most murderous century in world history, the 20th. And, of course, we are all still enjoying the fruits of that and will for some time to come. Ms. Peercy said that Rousseau theorized that the ideal legislator, and this is also crucial, should feel within himself the capacity to change human nature. Now, I want you to think about that for a moment the next time you’re watching your congressman on television pontificating about this or that subject. He says the ideal legislator would feel himself, within himself, the capacity to change human nature. Our courts sometimes seem to act like they feel they have the capacity to change human nature. So does the House. So does the Senate. These things are out there. And where do they come from? Well, I don’t know where the original roots are, but I do know they passed through Paris in a man named Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He said, if human nature is indeterminate and can no longer be defined positively, then there is an unlimited space for the state to impose its own definition of human nature. And then, of course, to make laws, make decrees, whatever it may take, in order to organize us in whatever way it chooses. In the state of nature, human beings are autonomous cells with no ties to others except, and here we come to something crucial, except those they choose for themselves. Virtually by definition, then, any relationships not a product of choice are oppressive, such as the biological bonds of family, the moral bonds of marriage, the spiritual bonds of the church, or the genetic bonds of clan and race. Quoting Nancy Peercy. You realize what I just read to you? According to this light way of looking at things, all relationships not a result of choice are oppressive. It was at this point, as I read through her comments about Rousseau’s theory of the social contract, I began to see the genesis of the language of abortion and a woman’s right to choose. Because you see, when biology imposes upon a woman a new life forming within her, she has entered an involuntary relationship and is now being required to carry within herself a new life that is not her. And so she needs to have, in order to be completely free, the choice… to terminate that life. This is why the language of pro-choice runs down the channel it does. Now according to this line of political thought, the natural bond of mother and child are oppressive. Now you think about that the next time you’re watching mother nursing her baby, when you see her holding the child in her arms and looking into its eyes face to face, mom and daughter, mom and son, and the bonding that’s going on between mother and child, This is an oppressive relationship, according to some thought. A woman has to be free to choose that relationship and not be forced to assume it. And so, because of the way people are thinking these days, women would leave their babies in dumpsters. there or perhaps in a restroom somewhere when they’ve given birth to something they didn’t want, to the extent that in Texas at least we’ve been forced to adopt a law which allows a woman no fault to bring by her newborn baby to any hospital and leave it there without any further obligation for the child. That’s the way thinking is going. It seems to me that pro-choice means a great deal more than merely to be pro-abortion. It has huge implications. political and moral overtones. Now when Rousseau came on the scene, the idea of the state as a liberator was a totally new concept. And well it might have been. For all the states, all the governments and everything up until that time had been major instruments of oppression for people. and of course would continue to be. But Rousseau still posited the idea of a state. But again, he’s living in an ivory tower, as it were. He’s living within his two ears. He is imagining a world that never had existed, never could exist, and never will exist. But this is the thinking, nevertheless, as impossible as it may be, that has profoundly affected our society, our legislatures, our educational system, our school boards, the teachers that walk into the classroom and teach your children. A great deal of what is there came right down this channel. When I read that Rousseau’s solution to the liberty of man was to state, my first reaction was, what? I don’t know if Ali heard me or not. It echoed through the whole house when I read this. I was just taken aback. But a woman named Hannah Arendt, who wrote a book called The Origins of Totalitarianism, she said this, that disconnected, isolated individuals are actually the most vulnerable to totalitarian control because they have no competing identity or loyalties. Now think that over. Isolated, disconnected individuals are the most vulnerable to totalitarian control. And if you just trace your finger back through history, you’ll see that’s true. Now, Nancy Peercy says then that the best way to protect individual rights is by protecting the rights of groups like families, churches, schools, businesses. Voluntary association, including your old Lions Club, the Rotary, or whatever else it may be. Strong independent social groupings actually help to limit the state, and in practice they actually do. I think they’re called intermediate institutions or something like that, whereas the church, the clubs, the organizations like the American Red Cross and all this, these organizations that are not the state, that are outside of the state, are very important in limiting the power of the state. What they also turned out very recently to be was very instrumental in demonstrating the limitations of the state and the power of these institutions. Because it was these institutions, and Tyler, for example, I think we had eight shelters for people who had to flee one or the other of the hurricanes. Seven of the eight shelters were in churches, and you can guarantee that the one that was not was also staffed by people who were members of churches. It’s just the way it is in our country. Christian people take care of people. The state, well, who knows, at its best, with its best of intentions, still has Rousseau looking over their shoulder at the things that they do. Strong independent social groupings may help to limit the state because each claims its own sphere of responsibility and jurisdiction, thus preventing the state from controlling every aspect of life. Contrary to Rousseau, protecting moral and social kinship bonds actually protects individual freedom. Now, you can sit down maybe for a while and think this over as to how this also might apply in churches, church organizations, church relationships, and all the things that go along with it, that isolated individuals are vulnerable in ways that connected individuals or not. I think the younger generation, including a lot of us sitting right here, actually have been profoundly influenced by Rousseau’s doctrine of individual, radical individual autonomy. And it has affected the way we think, the way we look at life, the way we react to life situations, and has led, I’m afraid, to some really difficult and awkward decisions. Where all loyalties… are subordinated to one center, what do we have? Nancy Peercy put it this way. She said, “…in liberalism, the individual exists prior to its membership in moral communities like marriage, family, church, and polity. The self is even prior to any definition of its own nature.” In other words, the self identifies prior to any identification of who it is. Thus for liberalism, the core of our personhood is our ability to choose our own identity to create ourselves. To create the self. to make me something, to make what I am, for me to be what makes it what I am. That’s why relationships and responsibilities are often considered separate from, even contradictory to, our essential identity. Why individuals often feel they have to break free from their social roles as husband, wife, or parent in order to find their true self. Now, I’m not one who likes to use broad brushes like liberals and liberalism to paint things. But the fact of the matter is that the left wing of political and moral action in this country, which has become defined as liberal, can be defined, can be understood, and its origins can be traced. And here’s where we go. The basic tenet of liberalism, according to Nancy, is that no individual can have an obligation to which he has not consented. All human attachments are to be dissolved and then reconstituted on the basis of choice, that is, on contracts. And some fool has advocated contracts for children with their parents. That’s me, not Nancy Peercy. Ideas like these do not remain purely abstract and academic. They filter down from their professors to their students who may well put them into practice. May well? It’s been done again and again and again. If you want to know where the Supreme Court found the right to privacy that’s articulated in Roe v. Wade, you need look no further than Rousseau. Because this is the underlying political philosophy that led to a right of privacy that could ride right over the rights of unborn individuals. Now why am I telling you all this? The answer is, and the reason I am telling you this, is because God did not create us to be divided all over the landscape. He did not create us to be isolated, autonomous individuals, functioning on, soldiering on alone with no help from anybody and not in a position to help anybody. That’s not what he wanted for us. When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples a question. Matthew chapter 16 is where you’ll find this. He asked this question. He said, who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am? And they said, well, some say you’re John the Baptist. Some say Elijah. Others say Jeremiah or one of the prophets. He said, oh, yeah, I know. Who do you say that I am? Simon Peter answered and said, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said, Blessed are you, Simon Barjona. Flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but my Father which is in heaven. And then he said something truly important. You know it. You know it as well as the opening scripture in this sermon. I say unto you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my assembly, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Now, we waste a lot of time on the first part of that statement. And consequently, I’m afraid, sometimes miss the import of the latter part of the statement. I will build… My assembly and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And you need to understand that the word assembly, the word church here, is not a synonym for Christians. It does not take into account Christians as isolated, autonomous individuals at all. It uses the word assembly, and you can’t have an assembly when you never get together. It’s not a term to be applied to scattered sheep. The church is an assembly. Now, if we think of ourselves along the lines of modern political thought, liberal or conservative, as autonomous individuals, as atoms in space, which is what some social thinkers would have us think, I am persuaded that this is the point of what Jesus is saying. Listen carefully. The gates of hell is just another way of saying that together… We can defeat the most powerful force the enemy can throw against us. If we are in his assembly, if we are the assembly which he has built, the enemy can throw the gates of hell against us and not win. I really believe that’s what Jesus is driving at. It’s also a way of saying that if we don’t hang together, we may hang separately. Someone famously said. It was Peter who said, Be sober. Be vigilant. Because your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, walks around seeking whom he may devour. Now, to tell you the truth, I think we blame the devil for a lot of stuff that he can’t pull off and hadn’t pulled off. It makes a good excuse for a lot of things. Satan is really striking at his church. Well, yeah, but then sometimes so are we playing the fool. We often blame him for our own foolishness. But there’s one truth. in this that cannot be avoided or sidestepped. We do have an enemy who has our destruction as his objective, collectively or individually, whichever way he can get it. We do have an enemy, and we are more vulnerable off by ourselves than when we are together. Solomon said it. You know, a threefold cord is not easily broken. If one falls, his brother can help him up. Now, the reasons for all this are so obvious. Hebrews chapter 10, for example, verse 24 says, Let’s consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Sure. I mean, after all, we get together as a church and somebody comes in and says, Look, folks, we’ve been sitting around here long enough. Let’s get off our behinds. Let’s get out there and let’s help the community. Let’s get a food drive going. Let’s go help this widow put a roof back on her house. Who knows what people come up with? But somebody among us will come in and say, let’s do this. Let’s do that. Let’s organize a community vacation Bible study or Bible school for kids to bring the neighborhood kids in during the daytime to teach them the Bible and arts and crafts related to the Bible. People will come up with these and will spur one another to good works. It’s hard to do that by yourself. One person alone. In fact, there’s not a single one of us standing alone who has all of the things that he needs or she needs to do what needs to be done. I certainly don’t. I have one set of gifts, one set of abilities. And God has kicked the door open before me and kind of shoved me through it, and I’ve gone after that. I do what I do. I can’t do what you do. And so we go down the road. Without me by myself, I can do this. But with all of us together, we can really begin to do some stuff. He said, let’s not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing. Let’s encourage one another and all the more as you see the day approaching. The church, and everybody knows this, is a support group. It makes demands on us while it offers us help. It’s a two-way street. Expects certain things of us and offers certain things to us. But there’s another level of this that we have to think about, and I don’t think it’s being clearly thought on. Is it a good idea, if it’s a bad idea for you to be out there as an Adam all by yourself, a lone ranger as it were, is it a good thing for your church to be out there all by itself and disconnected? Is that a good thing? doesn’t seem logical that it would be, I want you to consider a fairly mundane example from the Bible. During the reign of Claudius, there was a terrible drought throughout the entire known world at that time. It was not, however, a total surprise to the church. The reason it wasn’t a total surprise is there was this prophet guy His name was Agabus. And he came down to Jerusalem from up in Antioch to talk to the church down there and to tell them there’s a famine, there’s a terrible drought coming, and it’s going to come during the reign of Claudius. Well, now the church took what he said seriously. The disciples, each according to his ability, depending on I can do this, he can do that, he can do the other thing. According to his ability, they decided to provide help for the brothers living in Judea. And this they did, and they sent their gift down there by the hand of Barnabas and Saul. You’ll find two, I’m not going to take the time to read them to you today, two lengthy references to this in Paul’s letter. One is 1 Corinthians 16, where he is exhorting them to get this thing ready. And then 2 Corinthians 8, where he sort of gives the impression that they hadn’t taken that first admonition to heed and they really needed to be jobbed again. And he goes to some extent to say, look, those poor people in Macedonia, you know them. They’re as poor as church mice. and they have got their offering ready, and you don’t. It’s what’s implicit in what Paul’s writing to the Corinthians. He takes them to the woodshed, as it were, over this question, we have got to get busy, and we’ve got to help the poor saints in Jerusalem. Now, what is striking to me, in all that I read of Paul’s letter in the book of Acts, there is not a hint of an authoritarian administration here. There aren’t any sanctions against people who don’t do these things. The Apostle Paul, though, with all of his moral authority, writes to them and says, what in the world are you doing up there? Let’s get busy. Let’s solve this problem. We’ve got to have starving brothers down in Jerusalem. We’ve got to send some food down there. And so he urged them to get together and work this problem out. Somebody saw a need and told people about it. The people went to work and met the need. It didn’t require a whip. to make that happen. They were able to do it without email. There were not a cell phone to be seen or heard. It was without the Internet, without even the printing press, without even the United States Postal Service or UPS, without cars, without SUVs, without power boats, without airplanes, no trains. They traveled on foot. on donkeys, on sailing ships that I would be afraid to get on. I got on a modern, a much more modern sailing ship, and I noticed that whenever we, all of us who were tourists on there were looking at it, this is one of the replicas, I think, of the ships that Columbus brought over. Whenever we all moved to the other side of the ship, which our guide had us do, the thing nearly turned over. It didn’t quite, but it tipped way over. And I thought, what? Go out in the North Atlantic in this thing? Not hardly. But, you know, that’s the way they had to go. And go they went. And they put us to shame. Now, there is an obscure prophecy in Malachi that reveals something very important. And it reveals this to us unambiguously, and I want you to understand what it is he’s saying here. It’s in Malachi chapter 3, this one you may want to turn to. He starts off with a bit of chastisement. He said, Your words have been very stout against me, says the Lord, and yet you say, Well, what have we said so much against you? Well, you have said it is vain to serve God. And what profit is there in keeping His ordinances? Why should we do these laws of God? We that have walked mournfully before the Lord of hosts, what has it done for us? And you call the proud happy. You call those that work iniquity happy. They that are set up and they that tempt God are even delivered. Then comes this marvelous prophecy that I think needs attention. Then they that feared the Lord spoke often one to another. And the Lord hearkened and heard it. And a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord and that thought upon his name. I don’t know. I’ve read the Scripture before, but for some reason it hit me like a ton of bricks when I looked at it this morning. No, it was last night. And I saw that statement. I knew about the we’re going to speak often to one another. You know, I’ve been on the Internet long enough to know what that’s all about. But what I had not really paid attention to was the Lord hearkened and heard it in a book of remembrance. It was written down before God in a book of remembrance as you and I talk to each other. Can you imagine that? The praise that we offer to God, the prayer requests that we exchange, the encouragement that we have experienced, the new insight into the Bible that we have experienced. And we send an email off to a friend and say, I was just studying my Bible today and I noticed this. And he writes back and says, yeah, I see what you’re driving at. I sent it over to my brother over here and he said, well, yes, but, and he added this. You know, all this conversation is going on between us all the time. How many of you here ever do email? See what I mean? I’m not going to ask about cell phones. But, you know, it’s something that we do all the time. We have Internet forums where we talk about God. We talk about whatever’s on our mind from time to time. But it’s always in the perspective of brothers and sisters talking with one another. In a spiritual sense, that is always there, even when we’re talking about movies or books or records or whatever it is that we enjoy. They that feared the Lord spoke often to one another, and the Lord listened in, and a book of remembrance was brought before him. He says, And they shall be mine in that day when I make up my jewels, and I will spare them as a man spares his own son that serves him. Then shall you return and discern between the righteous and the wicked, and between him that serves God and him that serves him not. It’s really staggering to me to think about this. That we pick up the cell phone to call a brother who’s down in the dumps and offer him some encouragement. There’s someone in God’s presence who writes that down in a book that we did it. And I guess wrote down what we said. When you send an email request to people you know about someone they know, somebody there in front of God opens up the book of remembrance and writes down what you sold that person in that email. When we communicate back and forth about feast preparations and feast plans, it all goes in the book. As we talk about, well, how can we better worship God? How can we involve the young people in the church? Where shall we go to keep the feast? How shall we set things up? What sort of a program shall we put together to honor God? All that goes right into the book as we communicate. We who fear the Lord and love Him and love one another. When we struggle with doctrinal and theological issues, exchanging scriptures and doing our best to understand one another, it all goes in a book. It is a book of remembrance, which to me means God will never forget it. So our communications… are really important. And here we said, representing, I don’t have any idea how many churches per se, that we might call them churches, are represented here on this occasion. Dozens, I am sure. And we are here communicating with one another day in and day out for eight days of the Feast of Tabernacles. We do a lot of communication and preparation for the Feast of Tabernacles. And the Feast of Tabernacles, which God has given us and said, I want you to go somewhere. I want you to get up out of your house. You can’t eat your festival tithe at home. You’ve got to go somewhere to do this. His command for us to assemble broadly… not just in our own local little churches, is designed to force us into communication, to involve us in something bigger than ourselves. How that will work, I don’t know. I don’t know where God is going to take us. Now, one thing is virtually clear. I honestly don’t know how this is going to work with God when He doesn’t forget it. I’m not sure I could tell you why He promises He’ll never forget it and keeps that book. But one thing is abundantly clear. It is vitally important that we communicate, and not just among our own church circle. We need to think bigger than that. When Hurricane Katrina rolled through Louisiana, followed by Rita, Did you notice that it was the churches who were providing the shelter and clothing and food for the outcasts in those days? All across the South and way up into the middle of the country, churches were opening their doors, putting out cots, preparing meals, and even in some of the Red Cross shelters that were not in churches and civic centers and what have you, guess who was in there cooking the food and providing the food for those people? It was oftentimes churches. Do you think… A Methodist would turn down shelter in a Catholic church? You’re out on the street. You’re a Methodist. You’re not Catholic. And the one place you can go to as a Catholic church is providing shelter for people, and there are nuns and priests coming and going out of the place. Would you go there if you’re a Methodist? I would. I would go there no matter what I am. Those people are offering food and shelter. Would a Baptist church refuse you shelter because you were not a Baptist? You know they wouldn’t. You know they would give you the shirt off their back if you were in trouble and needed it. That’s what they do. They are Christian people. You know they would not turn you away. How could one kind of Christian look down his nose at another kind of Christian who’s giving him food and clothes and shelter merely because they weren’t the right kind of Christian? You know, when you get this thing in perspective, it becomes totally absurd, doesn’t it? Because the people who are doing these things are doing them because Jesus said they should. The motivation behind all these church elders is, guess what? The third parable of Matthew 25. And put my finger right on it. These people know. that when they do this, when they provide food and shelter and clothing to these people, they are doing it to Jesus Christ, and that’s why they do it. And so the absurdity of thinking about the doctrinal niceties of these churches really should stand out. Now, what’s my point? The day may come when people who name the name of Jesus Christ are all going to have to hang together. We may need for the world to see us united in Jesus Christ, even though we are still talking about the details. Even though we think that this guy over here is really… you know, missing the point entirely. I could use some other more pungent term for it. But we really think he is dead wrong. And we may argue with him from sunrise to sunset. We may exchange letters and emails. We may go around and around and around about our doctrinal differences. But when it comes down to the get-go, when we have to stand against the wiles of the devil, when we have to stand against our enemy, I would like to have him at my side, on the same side. regardless of how he looks at this or that of my doctrinal peculiarities. John said, By this shall all men know. No, John didn’t say it. John wrote it. Jesus said it. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another. And the question is, just how broadly does that reach? Well, I think that people who are willing to do a good work in the name of Jesus Christ can claim to be his disciples. They may be better disciples or worse disciples. They may be greater disciples or lesser disciples. But folks, they’re not Buddhists, they’re not Muslims, they’re not some other totally different religion, and they’re trying. And the time may come when we need them, or they need us, and we need to be there for one another. So what am I to think when a Baptist church loves me enough to give me shelter from the storm? I was amused some time ago. I cited an example in a sermon about two couples I knew, one in Australia, one in this country, who were miles and miles from any Sabbath-keeping church and had teens in their family. They, in both cases, independently of one another, started attending Protestant churches rather than be away from Christian fellowship altogether. They felt they needed, their kids needed to be in that society rather than out there by themselves or hanging out in the mall with all the problems they could get into out there. I made a public statement. I thought that made sense. And a few well-intentioned folks were scandalized by my statement. But I’ll bet… that those same people would accept food and shelter from one of those churches if they needed it. These people needed something those churches had to offer, and they went to it. We are the salt of the earth, and nothing that I am saying today should ever for a moment suggest, hint, or anything else that we should lose our distinct savor. Because we are a distinct people in God’s eyes, we have a flavor to Him. We should never ever think about losing that. But in the process of doing this, we should all maintain and be who we are and never forget what we stand for. But we should also stay in touch with people who don’t taste quite the same as we do. I would love to share my salt with any brother, any time. Now, I don’t know where God is leading us, but the wind of the Spirit is moving the leaves on the tree, and I can see it. It’s happening. Some of you have observed that you can see it, too. We don’t know where He’s taking us. But I do know this. We need to be bigger in heart and in soul and in spirit than we are. We need to share ourselves with others. We need to be in church. Our church needs to be in communication with other churches. Our denomination, if I may use that word, needs to be in communication with others. And you might be shocked at what you might learn. Then those who feared the Lord talked with each other, and the Lord listened and heard. A scroll of remembrance was written in his presence concerning those who feared the Lord and honored his name. It’s not good for man to be alone.