#4: “From an Acts 2 to an Acts 17 Culture”

SCRIPTURE: 1^st Timothy 4:1-4

        ¹I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: ²preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.  ³For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, ⁴and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

INTRO:

That time is now.  So many people claiming to be Christians no longer hold to “sound doctrine.”  And what is “sound doctrine”?  “Sound doctrine” is the teaching of Scripture – Scripture that tells us that God created the universe in six days; Scripture that tells us that Adam and Eve, the first two human beings, brought condemnation and mortalization upon all mankind; Scripture that tells us that after four thousand years God brought His Son into the world through a virgin named Mary, who was betrothed to Joseph; Scripture that tells us that only those who believe in Him and accept Him as Lord can be saved; Scripture that tells us the moral standards that God approves of; Scripture that tells us what we as Christians should believe and how we should live.

So many people today determine what they believe by today’s so-called “science” and make up their own moral standard, according to what “seems right” in our so-called “tolerant” culture.  Like the people after the period of the judges, “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

As I said in a previous sermon in this series, “We used to be an Acts 2 culture; today we’re an Acts 17 culture.”  We used to be a culture that needed to hear: “Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38).  Now we’re a culture that needs to hear: “I perceive that in every way you are very religious. . . The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man. . . He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth. . . that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.  Yet he is actually not far from each one of us. . . The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

Do you hear the difference?  The Acts 2 culture was ready to repent and accept Jesus as Lord and Savior.  They believed in God the Creator.  The Acts 17 culture didn’t believe in the Creator God.  Our culture is more like the Acts 17 crowd than the Acts 2 crowd.

As I said in an earlier message in this series, in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and even into the ‘70s, America was an Acts 2 culture.  Evangelists like Billy Graham could pack fifty and sixty thousand-seat stadiums and arenas.  After hearing a simple call to repent and accept Christ, hundreds – thousands even – would respond to the invitation.  That form of evangelism doesn’t work today.  Evangelists can’t pack stadiums and people don’t respond to the message.

So, how did we get to this point?  We’ve gone from an Acts 2 culture to an Acts 17 culture.  Why?  What happened?

First, let me be clear on something: