Winning Generations

From heresy to idolatry to witchcraft: this is actually Romans 1, professing ourselves to be wise, we become fools. Think of the celebratory way in which we now see evil getting more and more heinous. But then there is a second status. Not only do we see history and how evil gets more complex, but how every generation needs to be won each time over. This is so critical for us to understand in our ministry: how every generation needs to be won on its own terms.

You know, I was raised in a very comfortable home and all was well by Indian standards and so on. But my parents had absolutely no clue, no clue what was going on inside my heart, none. They had no idea how desperately I was moving towards self-destruction: not really their fault, but probably they just made the assumption they were okay, they came through all right, why can't my children just be all right as well. One of the saddest books I have ever read is a book called "Father and son", written by Edmund Gosse. These were two brilliant people, the father... The father was a marine biologist, Edmund Gosse, and the son, the brilliant guy who ended up as the curator of the library at the House of Lords. He was a professor at Trinity College, Cambridge: was knighted before he passed away.

And at the age of 58, he wrote a book about his father's faith and his faith and how he walked away from it. On the last two pages, you read this, his father writing to him, "Son, when you came to us in the summer the heavy flow fell upon me, I discovered how very far you had departed from God. It was not that you had yielded to the strong tide of youthful blood and had fallen a victim to fleshly lusts. In that case, however sad your enlightened conscious would have spoken loudly and you'd have found your way back to the blood which cleanses us from all sin to humble confession and self abasement to forgiveness to recommunion with God. It was not this. It was worse. It was horrid. It was insidious infidelity, which had already worked in your mind and heart with terrible energy, far worse because this was sapping the very foundations of your faith and all true Godliness. But you know, son, nothing seemed left to which I could appeal to you anymore. I found no common ground with you. The holy scriptures no longer had any authority and you had taught yourself to evade their inspiration. Any particular oracle of God which pressed you, you could easily explain away".

And he goes on and on. He said, "Please don't think I'm speaking to you in passion and using unanswerable strength of words, but if the written Word of God is not absolutely authoritative, what do we know of God? What more can we infer from Plato and Socrates and Cicero and all of that"? And he goes to this. "This dreadful conduct of yours I had intended after much prayer to pass by in entire silence, but your insincere inquiries after the cause of my sorrow have led me to go to the root of the matter and I could not stop short of the development contained in this letter. Son, it is with pain and not with anger that I send it to you, hoping that you may be induced to review the whole course of your life and that this is only a stage. If grace were ever granted to you in this, how joyfully should I bury all the past and again have this sweet fellowship with my son, my beloved son, as of old".

This is the son's closing paragraph after that letter in the book.

"The reader who has done me the favor to follow this record of the clash of two temperaments will not fail to perceive the crowning importance of this letter from which I have just made a long quotation. It sums up for me the closer logic of the whole history of the situation and I may leave it to form the epigraph for this little book. All that I need further to say is to point out that when such defiance is offered to the intelligence of a thoughtful and honest young man like myself with the normal impulses of my 21 years, there are only two alternatives: either I must cease to think for myself or my individualism or I must be instantly confirmed and the necessity of religious independence must be emphasized. No compromise is seen. No compromise was offered. No proposal of a truce would have been acceptable. It was a case of everything and nothing, and thus desperately challenged, I threw away my conscious once and for all and the yolk of this dedication and as respectfully as I could, without parade or remonstrance, I took upon myself a human being's privilege to fashion my inner life for myself". Pretty heavy stuff.

God is sovereign over history. And whatever happens, let us win this generation and put them into the places where they can reach their own, and let us know for a certainty, that as they reach their own we must find the involvement and the engagement. Let us not become cynical and apathetic, and leave the whims of others who take the people astray to another calling, and let them lead the whole nation in wrong directions. We can't do that. We must be involved. Place of history. Secondly, it's the place of the leader. And the place of history is efluctuation: in the place of the leader you see politicization.

I found out one thing, that those in politics who stay the course with a high character are so rare and absolutely indispensable to the ongoing flow of the leadership of nations. This man in Angola prison, Burl Cain, we've had lunch with him. Two politicians came to attend a closing meeting that I was speaking at, I won't even name what parties they were representing. But as we were walking away, we were driving in the same car together, and one of them was a prominent senator in the state, looked at me and he said, "We love this guy. The reason we've got him here is because he saved a hellish place in our city, and what he has done here in this prison. And these two men, one was the mayor: one was a senator, men of God, battling it out in a tough arena.

Ravi Zacharias (The Skeptic's View IV)