Sermon on the Mount | False Prophets - Then & Now | Matthew 7:13-20 | Week 13

My name's AJ.  I'm from Grand Rapids, Michigan.  It's really good to be here.  Here's a question I want to begin with:  Can we go deep this morning?  Is that okay?  Richard Foster had this amazing sentence in his work, Celebration of Discipline, when he says, "The world's greatest need today isn't for intelligent people or cool people or innovative people.  All that's well and good.  The world's greatest need right now is for deep people.  People who are thinking deeply about good questions about life and beginning to live in accordance with what they're discovering."   

In America, I'll suggest this, fifty years ago, God was largely assumed, so the temptation was to doubt.  In America today, God is largely ignored and the temptation is to believe.  We've entered a kind of cultural moment where the longing for something transcendent is returning.  I think we're discovering the career ladder isn't enough and that our consumer habits don't quite satisfy like they once did.  And more technology has only led to increased anxiety.  Do you remember the fax machine?  When that came out, everyone thought finally, we can rest, right?  I think many are beginning once again to ask the great questions, curious if maybe there is something beyond the stars.  Maybe what you're going to hear for the next few minutes isn't actually for you, but it's for your colleague, for your neighbor, to better understand the cultural moment that we're in, that we can begin to sort of say that's the frame of the twenty-first century American life.  How do I actually live within that frame given my neighbors and given my friendships and given my family members, who are just now moving out of cynicism and beginning to say maybe there is something beyond our grasp....something beyond that maybe just knows our names and maybe calls us the beloved. There's a haunting suspicion, I think, that's returning to the twenty-first century western hemisphere.  The haunting suspicion is that perhaps the cosmos is, in fact, enchanted with the divine, and that's it's not all just probability and a collision of molecules...