We’re then going to look at distress and the mental health crisis going on in America right now. Then we’re going to
look at divine deliverance uh before we come to our conclusions. That’s our journey this morning. And um, we’re
going to start out by looking at the question of decadence. And um so when I think of the word
decadence, the word that picture that comes to my mind is ancient Rome and the
wealthy in their incredible banquetss. And they would have slaves with long hair and rather than washing their hands
in the water, the Roman aristocrats when they when their hands were greasy from their chicken or whatever they were
eating, they would just rub it on the hair of the slaves sitting next to them. And so they use the long hair of the
female slaves to to clean their own hands. And so when you think of ancient Rome, we think of decadence. Um but
decadence um isn’t just an ancient phenomenon. It’s a modern reality as well. So I want to start out by talking
about universe 25. Has anybody ever heard of universe 25 here this morning?
This is one of the most famous psychological experiments done in the last 70 years. And it was done from 1968
to 1972 uh by a a researcher called John Calhoun
um who was he did an experiment on what would utopia look like for rats and then
for mice. uh they meant that the National Institute of Mental Health’s laboratory of psychology and in the
1940s and 1950s the global population was rising very very fast and people
were asking um how are how are we going to behave as human beings in a planet
that’s getting billions and billions and billions more people? How are we going to survive? How are we going to feed
ourselves? This was before the green revolution in the 1960s that that dramatically increased wheat yields
around the world and saved millions from starvation. But in the 19 um in this period here um the the the focus was um
how are we going to live on a crowded planet without killing each other? And so for his first 24 experiments in 1968
ended in failure because he didn’t have enough infrastructure in laboratory. But his 25th experiment was which is known
now as universe 25 was a resounding success. So in this experiment there he is there
standing in his in his this is the ideal mouse enclosure. You see the water
around the side for the mice to feed themselves. There’s an endless supply of food in here and um there’s little g
things that food nuts roll down here. They can all feast here. So this is the researcher here John Calhoun. He built
the the perfect mouse utopia.
And he started out by putting four fe four female and four male rice into this
enclosure with an abundance of food, water, the perfect heat, and other
necessities for mice to live. And the mice thought it was wonderful.
They had as much food as they wanted. They had as much water as they wanted. There were no predators in the this
ideal mouse utopia. And they started breeding and they started breeding.
By day 560, those initial eight mice had the population grew to 2,200 mice,
all anxiously waiting each day for the food spirit to arrive and sometimes erupting into open fights among the
mice. And the mice spent most of their time in the presence of hundreds of other mice.
But John Calhoun noticed something was happening that as the population imp uh grew so the behavior of the mice started
to change. Few females carried their pregnancies to term. More and more litters were born
prematurely and as the population increased the mothers started abandoning their litters prop preferring to move
away from their babies to live in a h to live in an isolated part of this mouse utopia and leaving the litter to die.
Calhoun noticed that there was always a select group of mice. He called them the beautiful ones. They isolated themselves
in protected places of this mouse utopia with a guard mouse post at the entry.
They had no interest in mating with other mice. They didn’t want to fight with other mice. They just wanted to
eat, sleep, and groom themselves. Due to this social dysfunction, the mice
population collapsed after day 560. The beautiful ones isolated and
self-obsessed behavior lowered their birth rate. In the overcrowded common areas, more and more babies were simply
abandoned by their mothers. Around day 600, the baby mice were surviving no
more than a couple of days. The population plummeted towards extinction as the remaining adult mice went into
hiding, refusing to breed and preferring to eat and groom themselves all day long.
Now this was a fascinating study for many people. It’s one of the landmark psychology studies of the last 70 years.
His experiments had a frightening conclusion for modern man that if
everything you need for life is already provided and if you don’t need to work for your daily bread and you don’t need
to improve yourself or educate yourself or learn technical skills. If everything
is provided and sacrifice and saving are no longer needed, decadence can easily
set in. In this mice population, material abundance led to open violence
among the mice. A lack of interest in mating. In fact, mating stopped completely. Many mice withdrew from the
wider mouse community. They abandoned their children. So, their children simply died. And they they ex they
exhibited signs of narcissism with excessive self-interest and uh grooming themselves night and day.
Now this is describing mice.
I’m not describing modern society here.
But you understand why when he came out with the the these these um the study results, the people said this is a
worrying sign for human civilization. Because if everything is provided for you and you don’t have to work for
anything and your future food is guaranteed for as long as you can possibly imagine,
then why would you improve yourself? Why would you study? Why would you defend anything today? Because you’ll get it
given for you free tomorrow. And so as we see in America, this
description of the mice kind of describes much of modern America today that when there is an overabundance
that those who were enjoying did not create for themselves, it leads to a social collapse.
Decadence is a moral and a spiritual disease. It results from having excess power and
wealth for too long by people who never earned it in the first place. It produces cynicism. It
leads to the decline of religion. It leads to pevent pessimism and frivolity. Decadence often happens when young
people have everything for life provided for them at an early age. When I got married with my wife, we
lived on pennies and we dreamt that one day we could get
a refrigerator. Now, we lived in a very cold part of the caucuses where it was well below
freezing in our house cuz there was an economic blockade on and we didn’t need a refrigerator because everything left
on the kitchen table just froze overnight. And if I wanted any cheese the next day,
I simply grated the frozen cheese onto my bread and the grater would take off the cheese that that that we needed.
But it doesn’t harm a young married couple to start out with nothing. And it doesn’t harm young people to start out
with nothing and to have to earn the blessings of life. But when everything is handed on a plate, then pe pessimism,
frivolity, and decadence set in. Paradoxically, while the working poor
have to work to provide for their daily bread, it is more often than not the children of wealthy families whose every
physical need has been met, who dabble in identity politics, cultural Marxism,
Antifa protests, environmental activism, trans ideidology, or neihilistic violence. Why do they do this? Because
nobody can live for long without a purpose. Each of these ideologies provides a
temporary purpose that alleviates the pain of the meaninglessness of life. And
in a decadent society, when everything’s provided, a pessimism sets in. The civil
institutions start to fail. Cynicism hastens the internal political and
social decline. Frivolity and sensual indulgence, which are byproducts of despair. They’re the fre frequent
companions of pessimism. We say, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” In such a society, you see a
rise of addictive behaviors. Marriage and birth rates collapse, abortion rates sore, and social decay combines with so
political polarization to push that mouse utopia or modern day America to
the point of social collapse. Despair is a parallel to decadence. Despair is a
product of a decadent society and our modern western society lives in the
midst of a philosophy of despair. Now we live technically in what some people call the postmodern era and I’m sure
some of you are familiar with the postmodern era but up until about 1945 1950 the world in the west was
modernist. We had the idea that technology will always bring progress. But after the slaughter of World War I
and the slaughter of World War II and and after we saw that democracy brought us Adolf Hitler and Marxism brought us
the communist goolags and science brought us the atom bomb then we started
to become disillusioned with the promise of progress. And so in the 1950s onward we started to
see something called postmodernism. It was a disillusionment with all the
progress that the west seems to offer through the advance of technology. Postmodernism represents a profound loss
of meaning in our western society. And it’s a philosophy of neilistic despair at the underlying human condition. And
this morning we spoke at the start of that sum there about the rise of nihilistic violence in America. No lives
matter. This is a product of this philosophy of despair that is fed to our young people
in public colleges and on social media today. Public postmodernism says that
nothing matters in life. Nothing has purpose. Nothing has meaning. And if nothing has purpose, nothing has per
meaning, nothing has any goal. That means that nothing in your life matters.
And if nothing matters, nothing has meaning. Nothing has purpose. Then I don’t matter and you don’t matter. It
doesn’t matter whether we live or whether we die. It doesn’t matter whether I help you across the road or it
doesn’t matter if I push you in front of a truck. Nothing matters. And so in this world of of postmodern
philos this this philosophy of despair that we’re living with these days, um our young people are seeking meaning in
the whole spectrum of ideologies and movements that are out there. Our young people are because you cannot live
without meaning or purpose indefinitely. When I was at New College, they had the
movie come out called The Passion of the Christ with Mel Gibson. And uh we went down, we got these little
um books, The Desire of Ages, and we we printed out just the chapters relating to Gethsemane and the crucifixion of
Christ. We put a lovely cover on the front um from the from the movie so they recognized they tied the book to the
movie. And we stood we stood outside the movie theaters and when people came out
um from those movies from that particular movie they they look like a shock on their faces the horror they
look shocked they looked depressed they weren’t speaking nobody was talking in the parking lot um the the movie was
just a like a 2-hour horror movie of the suffering that Christ went through and we struck up a lot of conversations with
a lot of young men and there was one group of teenagers and I was chatting with them they were 16 17 and Um what I
realized was that these guys have nothing to live for. So I I started asking like what do you
live for? Basically he said
get drunk, get to know a woman and then die.
That was the purpose of this young man’s life. Nothing else was worth living for.
Today our young people um 30s and below they’re finding purpose and meaning not
in the gospel but in the range of ideologies and worldviews that uh that flood across America. Some people are
champions for nationalism. Some people are champions for and globalism. Some people are champions for the environment
like Greta Tunberg. Some people are some people are champions of cultural Marxism. Some people are gay rights
movement activists. Some people stand up for queers for Palestine though certainly not in Palestine. Some people
stand up for free Palestine or they engage in the free DC movement. Some people lobby for trans rights, other for
Antifa, others others going to Zen Buddhism. Some are del delving into the occult. Some people go into Black Lives
Matter. Some people go into no lives matter. Some people are going into nihilistic violence, extremism, and all
this entire spectrum of ideas that are out there that are snaring and catching young people in particular because they
promise meaning and purpose and a righteous cause to fight for. And if you fight for a righteous cause, it means
you’re a righteous individual. So people are seeking righteousness apart from God. In the in in in the spectrum
ideologies, they’re undergurtded by a philosophy of despair. Now, I showed this slide a few weeks ago in another
sermon, but I’m going to show it again. Nothing captures better the cry of the modern heart for meaning in the midst of
a post-modern worldview of despair than the song the show must go on by Queen.
Has any of you heard of the English rock group Queen? As some of you won’t know, we’re not going to raise your hands. All right, I
understand. And they had some they have very some very famous songs um and uh but one of
them was written by Freddy Mercury, the lead singer. Now Freddy Mercury um was gay. He boasted of sleeping with over a
thousand men. And when the AIDS epidemic came through Europe in the um early 1980s, he uh he uh get got AIDS. And
after he was informed that he got AIDS, he wrote a song called The Show Must Go On. Some of you know that song or you’ve
heard it. It’s a very famous song. And the the lyrics of that song are on the
screen there for you to see. And I’m not going to read it the way Freddy Mercury did it because he had a he had like two
octaves higher than I do for speaking. But this is what he said. He said,
“Empty spaces, what are we living for? Abandoned places. I guess we know the
score. On and on. Does anybody know what we are looking for?” That’s the end of
the first verse. Then the second verse says this, “Another hero, another mindless crime behind the curtain in the
pantomime. Hold the line. Does anybody want to take it anymore?” Then you get
the chorus, which is the show must go on. The show must go on. Then he goes into, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I can’t do
that.” He then says, “Inside, my heart is breaking. My makeup may be flaking, but my smile stays on.” Goes on to say,
“Whatever happens, I leave it all to chance. Another heartache, another failed romance. On and on. Does anybody
know what we are living for? Then that this last verse is heartbreaking. Says, “I guess I’m learning. I must be warmer
now. I’ll soon be turning round the corner now. Outside the dawn is
breaking, but inside in the dark I’m aching to be free.”
Now, if you just combine there, those are the last lines of each of those verses. Does
anybody know what we’re looking for? Does anybody want to take it anymore? Does anybody know what we are living
for? But inside, in the dark, I’m aching to be free.
Freddy Mercury tasted everything this world has to offer, and these were his
dying thoughts. Some of his last songs that he recorded. It’s not a song of triumph, is it?
It’s a song of despair. He tried everything this world has to offer.
Everything that the sexual revolution said will add meaning and purpose and joy to your life. He did everything
possible. And at the end of it, he says, “Does anybody know what we’re looking for?
Does anybody want to take it anymore? But inside, in the dark, I’m aching to
be free.” When you read these lyrics, I mean, what
it does for me is it changes my view of Freddy Mercury.
I used to seem when I was growing up as a godless rock star with um endless um
beer and debauchery. But as I’ve got older, I’ve realized that he was a man searching for meaning
and purpose in a philosophical world that denied the possibility of meaning and purpose.
And this is maybe one of the greatest human tragedies there is. He was searching for meaning. He was searching
for love. He was searching for identity. He was searching for a future. But as
he’s about to die, he’s still asking the question, “Can anybody tell me what this is all about?”
And we start to see singers like this not as rebels against God, but as lost
human beings desperately trying to find something better. We start to understand where in the
gospels it says Jesus never looked on the crowds with anything other than compassion
because this man followed the gods of this world. He followed the ideologies of this world. He embied the
philosophies of this world. And most people don’t think outside the worldview that they’ve been given by their
society. He did everything he could to find meaning and purpose and love. But at the end of the day, he died very
lonely. See, we all yearn to matter. We all yearn to see and to be seen. We want to
know and to be known. We want to hear and to be heard. We want to accept and we want to be accepted. We want to be
vulnerable without fear of rejection, which is why divorce is so painful. We learn to love and to be loved. And so
the cry of the human heart in mo the modernday west is fundamentally at odds with the underlying philosophy of
despair that undergurs western society. And if despair is the foundation of our
western society, this is expressed in our mental health crisis. Today I want to dwell for a few moments on this
question of distress. Now I chose this picture deliberately.
What are they all doing?
Yeah, they’re all talking to each other. Yes. Um, my wife was sitting next to me on
the couch once and I wanted a hot drink and her phone was in the kitchen, so I texted. I said, “Please, can you get me
a hot drink?” And she heard beep beep from the kitchen. I said, “Oh, you’ve got a text. You should go and check
that.” So she got up and went to the uh kitchen and I didn’t get a hot drink.
But um developmental psychologists use the concept of parallel play. And when
when children go to a kindergarten when they’re two and three years old, they don’t play with each other. They play
alongside each other. Like you may have a hundred little toddlers playing on the floor and they’re not so much
interacting with each other, but they’re playing alongside each other. They call it parallel play. And parallel play is a
good description of much of modern family life today. We have parallel lives, but we rarely talk face to face
with each other. People sit at the kitchen table and everybody’s on their phone.
And your spouse says, “I need an important conversation with you.” And a notification goes off, say, “Wait a minute, you know, the weather may have
changed in India. Let me just check.” And so we have this concept of parallel
play all around us today. But this this distress caused by a philosophy of
despair is leading to a mental health crisis in our nation today.
And I want to talk about one particular aspect of that and that is anxiety. Now
there are many there are many contributing factors to our mental health crisis. The COVID pandemic didn’t
help. In fact, it exacerbated the downward spiral for many people. childhood divorce, divorce in general
actually, the moral decay, the economic insecurity we see all around us. But
there is one particular factor that has accelerated the mental health crisis since the year 2010.
Now, what causes generations to differ is not merely the year they were born or the experiences they went through. So,
some people went through the Great Depression together, some people went through World War II together, uh you might say the greatest generation, some
people went through the Vietnam era together and that was a defining force in their childhood and it shaped how
they think today. But, um what also defines generations is the technology they grow up with.
And my grandfather was raised in the era of the radio. Then my father was raised in the era of
the te the black and white television. And when I was being raised in the early
and late 1970s, that’s a long time ago now. When I was being raised in the late 1970s, um we had a gramophone.
We’d play our LPs on it. And my uncle once visited from Lo Molinda and he had
an IBM personal computer and it was bigger than a suitcase and it
was in a huge case and he had to feed in these like 5 and a half inch or so floppy discs into it and there was a
little screen like this with these aluminous green letters flashing across it and he was explaining how this
incredible thing was helping him write his dissertation. I couldn’t see the point of it. But um anyway, my
generation grew up with the first computers. We grew up with things like the Spectrum 48 or the Commodore 64
computers. Do some of you remember that? That’s not 64 terabytes. That’s 64
bytes. That’s 64 bytes.
We had a game in England that my cousins would play. We went to visit them once and there was a tape a cassette player
on the table and there was a cassette in there. It was a 1k game. 1k.
And it and it took half an hour to load up on this screen. It was basically like these spacemen coming down and you had
to shoot them from somewhere at the bottom. And we we were fascinated by this latest technology. And when we went
to um they they introduced a computer that was 126k. We were just astonished that where’s technology going to end?
So, we grew up in my my generation. We didn’t have iPhones. We didn’t have the internet. And we were we were playing
around with computers uh with 5 1/2 in then we had 3 and 1/2 in floppy discs.
And it’s interesting today that most young people under the age of 30 when they look at Microsoft Word the symbol
for save is a three and a half inch floppy disc. Yes. But most of them have never seen one in their lives. But they
just know that means save. But most of them have never actually seen a floppy disc. They wouldn’t know it if it would
hit them in the face. They say, “What is this and where does it go?” So, we’re often defined by the
technology that we have when we grow up. Generation Z called Gen Z is that was born from 1995 onwards is the first
generation in history to experience puberty with smartphones in their pockets.
It’s the first generation h in history with the internet in their pockets. They have a gateway to every imaginable
expression of human knowledge, emotion, vice, and violence. Generation Z has everything at their
fingertips. No other generation has had that. Genesis 3 4 and 5, the serpent
said to the woman, this is the temptation of Eve says, “But the serpent said to the woman, you shall not die,
for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes shall be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” And
that’s a this a Hebra and that’s a Hebrew way of expressing. So when when the Hebrew says you’ll know good and
evil, it means you’re going to know everything that is good and everything that is evil and everything in between.
It’s just like when it says that David counter the people of Israel from Dan in the north to Beers in the south. Then
you have these two opposite and polar ends. Polar opposites it means and everything in between. So the first
temptation was that we would know everything possible to know
which we now have on our cell phones. We now can have accomplished that on our
cell phones. We would become like gods, said Satan.
But it led to the human fall. The ability to know good and evil and everything in between. Um unrestricted
knowledge led to the human fall. And beginning in the 1980s,
and this is an incredible book here. I’d encourage every parent or grandparent to read it. A lot of Adventistmies are
reading this book by Jonathan hate published in 2024. It’s called The Anxious Generation.
Now, he’s a researcher in this area. But beginning uh in the 1980s and accelerating the 1990s, uh how children
were raised changed dramatically. When I was being raised as a small kid, we got home from school, my twin brother and
myself and our two younger sisters, and my mom would push us out onto the street and she said, “Come back in two hours.
Off you go and play.” And that’s what we did. We climbed trees. We climbed on our neighbors
roofs. We broke windows. We did all kinds of things. We roed the fields around. We tried to set fire to a field
once. We We rode our neighbors bikes. We tried to be like evil conval cuz we’d heard about him, but we never succeeded.
We broke arms. We broke legs. We’d all m we did all manner of things. We played cowboys and engines and cops and
robbers. And we did we did incredible things. We made mud pies and we we often
paid for our sins when we got home. Um but we had incredible unstructured free
playtime. But in the 1990s, something shifted
and there was a rapid decline of unsupervised, unstructured outdoors play.
Part of that was because we were becoming more ligious. Part of it was because we we became
afraid of child abductions and assault on our children. And so we transitioned in the 80s and ‘9s from free play
from play-based childhoods to phone-based childhoods. What did this mean in practice? It meant
that we went from overp protection in the physical world meant we moved to underpro.
overp protection in the physical world. We can’t let you out to play. There are bad things out there. Here’s an iPad. Do
whatever you want on it. So, we were overprotective in the physical sphere and we shifted our children to a
phone-based childhood in the 1990s when we bit in the early 2000s and now we were underprotective in the digital
world. Most parents have little idea what their children are watching online. In fact, they have almost no idea what
their kids are watching online. We’re physically protective of their bodies, but we take almost no consideration for
what is what they’re feeding their minds with. And this led to a distressed generation. So our relationships have
changed. So this is the real world relationships. These are virtual relationships. So we went in the 1990s
here to here. So we used to have embodied relationships. As we use our bodies to
communicate with each other, we’re conscious of the bodies of others and we respond to the bodies of others
consciously and subconsciously. We were very aware of the physical side of life. But now our young people are growing up
and we have disembodied relationships where no physical body is needed. You don’t actually need to see somebody. You
just have language. And increasing your partners in in your language could be AI.
We’ve also moved from real world relationships that are synchronous. that is they are happening at the same time
and then there are subtle cues about timing and turn taking in those conversations. We learn to read a
conversation. We learn to follow a conversation. We learn when to stay quiet and when we can jump in and say
something but we’ve moved to asynchronous relationships. That is we have multiple conversations going on at
the same time on our phones. Is that true? Yes. Yeah. We have we have I mean on my phone
I’ve got I don’t know 10 different communications apps you know I’ve got line for Southeast
Asia and Zoom and Telegraph and Signal instant message and WhatsApp and regular
messaging and Gmail and proton mail and A&2P mail and oh and they can somebody
can actually call you as well if they actually want to communicate with you and it’s possible to be managing six or
seven relationships conversations simultaneously on your phone. This ends up to us sending the wrong messages to
the wrong people. And we’ve all done that, I think, at some time in our lives.
We’ve moved from real world relationships where we had onetoone or one to several
communications, that is you you had only one interaction happening at any given time to one to
many communications. Now we’re broadcasting our lives and our communications to a wide vast audience
on the internet and multiple interactions happen in parallel one to another. Now the consequence of this is
that it used to be that relationships were hard work but they were also very meaningful and so relationships used to
have high entry and high exit bars. Thus, people were very strongly motivated to invest in their
relationships, to maintain their relationships, and to repair their relationships. This led to stable
community relationships that were long-term, and we treasured our long-term relationships.
But what has happened with the virtual world is we have low entry and exit
bars. In fact, people can become your friends and you don’t even know about it on social media.
People follow you on social media and all you know all you see is the numbers but you don’t know who they are from Adam or Eve. And so therefore if there
is low entry and low exit bars people have almost no motivation to maintain, repair or invest any relationship. We
simply unfriend or block people and then we move on. The net result of this is
that communities have become short-lived and our relationships are disposable.
So this is the shift that’s taken place since the 1990s. And this has affected our mental health.
Now, research shows that there are four foundational harms contributing to our current mental health crisis relating
particularly to smartphones. And the first is this
social deprivation. Studies are now showing that teenagers
now spend over 7 hours a day on screenbased activities, not including home or school work. More than seven
hours a day. Our young people, teenagers are living on their phones.
When American adolescence adopted smartphones, time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted from
almost 2 hours a day in 2012 to 67 minutes a day in 2019. So face-toface
communication among American teenagers has plummeted. This has led to social
and d isolation and deprivation. We also have parallel to that sleep
deprivation. Anybody notice when people are sleepd deprived?
Yes. Young adults are increasingly lying in bed watching online content. It’s
easier to lie in bed and doom scroll and check out the latest updates than it is to engage in a real meaningful human
conversation. Sleep deprivation is well documented particularly among teens and young children. And it leads directly to
depression, to anxiety, to irritability, to cognitive deficits, to poor learning
outcomes, gives lower grades. It leads to more road accidents and deaths from accidents in general.
And so the sleep deprivation that comes with scrolling late at night is having a directly negative effect on large
numbers of our young adults. The third thing that we notice uh there’s a foundational harm from the current me
mental health crisis and and smartphones is what we call attention fragmentation.
That is people are finding it harder and harder to stay on one task and to finish one task because there are so many
off-ramps coming their way from their smartphones. Um staying on task requires maturity and
high executive function. Smartphones are giving hundreds of notifications per day. That stops that harms your ability
to stay focused on task. I I sit at home writing a sermon and my
phone’s going beep beep beep beep beep beep beep I mean for hours next to me
and it causes immense stress because are they telling me that you know in a week’s time the storm will end or are
they telling me that you know my wife’s in a hospital? I don’t know. And so you check every time and and it’s it’s
immensely disturbing. And so we we struggle with with focusing on task and
we become kind of like scatterrained. We we we struggle to maintain our attention on any one thing. And then the fourth um
harm from our smart smartphones is actually addiction is for animals. We
know that the wearing of a smooth path in the brain leads to learning. And the modern-day apps are using advanced
behavioral techniques to hook children into becoming heavy users of their products. Dopamine release is
pleasurable, but it doesn’t give you a feeling of satisfaction. That’s the problem with dopamine release. So, what it does is it makes
you want more dopamine releases to keep the pleasurable feeling, but you never achieve satisfaction.
What does this mean? It means that when you’re not getting those constant dopamine triggers and releases, um, you
get the symptoms of withdrawal, which are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and
gender dysphoria. So, when did this crisis really take off? Well, the crisis can be traced back
to 2007. In 2007, that was when iPhones were released on the American market.
the iPhones released and then the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Galaxy X were released in June 2010. Those were the first
phones with a forward- facing camera and that really kicked the mental health crisis into full into full crisis.
Instagram was then released, growing rapidly to over 90 million users by early 2013. Instagram then added
filtering and editing software, meaning that when a girl looked at herself in the mirror, her reflection was less
attractive than the edited, filtered, or airbrush pictures that she saw of other women online.
And so, girls started to withdraw from social interaction because I can’t compete with the real world.
I mean, most teenage girls, they’re kind of gawky. They may have pimples on their faces. Yes. And they look at these
airbrushed pictures all over. to social media. I can’t compete with that. The solution is just to stay at home and
withdraw from social interaction. I don’t want people to see the real me because all they see is the ideal me.
That’s the airbrushed me on Instagram. And I want them to know that that’s me. And so teenage girls in particular using
Instagram have withdrawn from much of social interaction. Boys, meanwhile, weren’t so concerned about Instagram and
editing pictures of themselves. They buried themselves in multiplayer first shooter video games like um Call of
Duty, YouTube, Reddit, and hardcore porn. That’s what boys went into. And from 2010 onwards, we started to see a
major health crisis among our teens and young adults. And so between 20 from
2010 to 2015, um there was a 150% increase in reported
um reported depressive disorders among teens. and that crossed all sex, race, and um soio economic lines. So, it
didn’t affect white people more than Hispanics or vice versa. This was an equal opportunity scourge that affected
every group in America from particularly from 2010 onwards with the release of the the smartphones and then Instagram
and and products like that. We started to see a massive increase in mental health problems among our young teens.
Girls experienced internalizing disorders mostly such as anxiety and depression in which a person feels
strong distress and they experience those symptoms inwardly such as anxiety and fear and sadness and oftentimes
social withdrawal. Girls experience that kind of thing more than boys. Boys on the other hand had outward turning
symptoms such as violence and excessive risk-taking. But both boys and girls have experienced
this this crisis in mental health. The American College Health Association did
a report in in 2019 and uh they they charted across all the colleges
reporting America from 2010 to 2018 and they wanted to see was were there any changes in the mental health of students
on American campuses. What they found was over those nine years there was 134%
increase in reported anxiety, 104% increase in depression, 72% increase in
ADHD, 57% increase in bipolar um uh disorder, 100% increase in anorexia, 67%
increase in schizophrenia, and a 33% increase in substance abuse or
addiction. This is a tidal wave of suffering on our college campuses nationwide.
It’s it’s a tragedy. We have little idea of the mental health problems affecting
young adults today. This anxiety epidemic has certain
consequences. It’s leading to social withdrawal, emotional exhaustion and burnout, crippling fear and anxiety over
everyday activities, and cognitive distortions such as catastrophic thinking, doom scrolling, thinking in
black and white in rigid ways, overgeneralizing, body tension, and tightness. From 2010
to 2020, there was a 188% increase among girls visiting ER for self harm as
cutting themselves and a 48% increase for boys over the corresponding period.
Girl suicide rates among teenagers rose 167% between 2010 and 2020 and boys rose
by 91%. So when people say that I’m triggered
and I need a safe space and I’m anxious, this isn’t a moral failure that’s
talking to you. If this is happening across our society, then something is
happening within our society to cause this. We may think of these people like
slightly crazy and just, you know, get a grip and so forth. But no, changes have happened in our society and we are
witnessing the fruit of some of the changes that we brought into our society. Academic studies have shown that social
media particularly for girls is not a correlate of anxiety and depression but
it’s the cause of anxiety and depression. Girls prefer visually oriented platforms
such as Instagram and Tik Tok. Girls are very sensitive to comparisons with other girls, visual comparisons. Girls are
very concerned of almost given up trying to live up to physically impossible standards, whether it’s seen in porn
movies or social media. And as a result, they often express aggressiveness towards other girls on social media by
harming their reputations online. And they open themselves up to aggressive male stalkers who pressure them into um
sharing um nude pictures of them while online. And among boys, how do they respond to this mental health crisis?
Well, for many boys, there’s been a withdrawal from the physical world. Fewer and fewer young men are taking
time out to go hiking, mountaineering, kayaking, or risk-taking. They’re
shifting to the virtual world of online gaming. Young men are now failing to launch as young adults. They’d rather
stay at home playing their video games. They’re not ready for marhood, marriage, and fatherhood or employment. Why?
Because they’re addicted to porn and online gambling, which is a huge problem among teenage young men. They’re drawn
to neihilistic violence, identity group politics, and radical activism to try and find meaning in life.
So this is a description of where we’ve come as a society. We have decadence and
we have despair. And you know, Jesus never looked on a crowd
with anything other than compassion. So I want to encourage us today. You know, teenagers today have a hard life. Yes,
everything may be provided, but they’re living with a level of temptation and 24/7 assault on their characters that we
never grew up with in my generation. Children these days are bombarded with godless messages 24/7.
I never had that growing up. I grew up in a relative paradise compared with what modern teenagers have to live with
today. And so the mental health crisis, the addiction crisis, the gambling, the
pornography, the violent gaming, the acting out, the self harm, the suicide attempts, mediation, these are all the
fruit of a society gone wrong. They are not the cause of a society going wrong.
So what do we say from a Christian in response to this? Well, I want to talk about, we’ve talked about despair and
decadence. I want to talk about deliverance because
at the deepest level possible, there’s an essential agreement between born again disciples of Jesus Christ and
today’s lost and hurting generation. And the agreement is this. Without God,
humanity has no meaning. Without God, humanity has no purpose. Without God,
nothing matters. And it’s always important when we share the gospel with somebody to try and find
a common starting point. For our missionaries in Papu Nagini, they work among animists. And you may say, well,
what does an Adventist missionary have in common with an animist who worships these spirits? And how do you share the
gospel with an animist who every day makes a sacrifice to get the spirits off his or her back? And the answer is this.
Both we as Adventists and they as animists all believe in the reality of spirits.
We also believe there are evil spirits. We also all believe that Satan is like a
roaring lion seeking whom may devour. That is these evil spirits are intent on destroying all that is good in your life. We can agree on those three
things. But then the solution is the animists believe you need to offer a chicken to goat or a buffalo to get the
the spirits off your back temporarily. But we believe there was a once and for all blood sacrifice to buy you back from
slavery to those spirits once and for all. which sacrifice is the better sacrifice, the sacrifice of the chickens
or the sacrifice of Christ? And so when you’re talking with people, it’s always helpful to think how do we
have a common starting point where even if we have nothing in common with, you
know, some of those people we see out in the streets for instance, there is always this like something we have in
common. I would say this that what we have in common with much of young America today is that there is is the
recognition that if there is no God in life, there is no revealed morality, then nothing has purpose and nothing has
meaning. We can all start with that basic common starting point. It means that our hopes, our dreams, our loves
and our successes are ultimately meaningless. And so as Christians, we’re not to point to ourselves and say,
“Well, look at my example. I did well in life.” Our our our solution is to point to Jesus
and to invite people to look upon Jesus and those who are suffering. We can invite them to look upon Jesus as the
suffering servant of God. He went through suffering as much as young people go through suffering today. A
very famous passage here, Isaiah 53. We’re very familiar with it. I’ll just show the first eight voices here. It
says of Jesus, “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him.”
That is, he wasn’t an airbrush model on Instagram.
Nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. Nobody would take a second glance at
him. He was just a regular run-of-the-mill guy. And if you saw him, you wouldn’t think twice. He was
despised and rejected by others. He knew what social rejection felt like.
He knew what cancel culture felt like. He knew what it was to be unfriended or blocked on social media.
He was a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity and grief. He knew what
it was to go through depression and loneliness and to be abandoned by his
friends. And as one from whom others hide their faces, he was despised and we
held him of no account. That is in in social terms he was
nothing. He was completely canceled. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our
iniquities. Upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray. We’ve all turned to our own way and the
Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. In modern terms, you might say,
“Yep, we’ve messed up as a society, but only Jesus will bear the ultimate guilt for that. He’s going to pay the
price.” He was oppressed and he was afflicted.
Yet, he did not open his mouth. He knew what corrupt justice looked like. He
knew what a corrupt religious system looked like. He knew what lying witnesses looked like. He knew what
police brutality felt like. He went through everything that our young people
protest today. He did not open his mouth, but like a lamb that is led to the shorter
slaughter, like a sheep that before its shears is silent, so we did not open his
mouth. He maintained a dignified silence by a perversion of justice, he was taken
away. Who could have imagined his future? for he was cut off from the land of the
living, stricken for the transgression of my people. If I may summarize that in
modern terms about Jesus, Jesus was a refugee child who was hunted by violent
men. He lived as an despised ethnic minority under a cruel and oppressive
political regime. He was a manual labor, a day living getting his daily wage,
living a life of relative poverty. And in his ministry he had he was homeless. He says the foxes of the air have the
the field have the hold dens in the fields and the birds have their nests in the trees but the son of man has nowhere
to lay his head. He was rejected by his family. His brothers and his mother intervened in Mark 3 cuz they said this
guy’s gone crazy. We need to take him home. He was betrayed and abandoned by his
closest friends. Every teenage girl knows what that feels like to be attacked online by your closest friends
and snarky comments on Instagram in the comments section. He was consistently misrepresented, smeared, and criticized
by the elites. Mom, you don’t understand me. All you do is criticize me. Well,
Jesus knows what that feels like as well. Where everything you say is twisted in use against you. He was
condemned to death by a rigged judicial system. People protest um police
brutality and criminal uh injustice today. Jesus was a victim of that as well. He knows what that feels like. He
was tortured and executed in the most painful humiliating way. In all our pictures of Christ on the cross, he
always has a loin cloth on. But in the gospels, they stripped him of his clothes. He hung there naked for the
whole world. He was designed to humiliate him. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. We can talk
about Jesus in many ways, but it’s important for us to recognize that the
Jesus we’ve just been describing here is one I believe that many young people today can relate to. That he’s he went
through what many young people today are experiencing. He knows the pain of rejection. He knows
the loneliness of social isolation. He knows the sense of anger at uh political
or police injustice. He knows what it is to be a man of sorrows and acquainted
with grief. And yet, despite all he went through, he never looked on a crowd with
anything other than compassion. He never passed through a town, but the sick were healed, the lepers were cleansed, the
dead were healed, and the demoniac set free. He never met a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, young or old, Jew or
Gentile, Roman or Pharisee, but he treated them with respect, with kindness, and genuine concern for their
eternal well-being. Jesus came in order to heal the weak and the sick. Now the
healthy have no need of a physician. Would you agree with that? Yes. But the sick do and each one of us is sinick in
our souls. We all bear in our lives the the imprint of sin. And that uh that
manifestation in of sin in our lives, it looks different in each of our lives, but we all have it. Some people have a
congenital disorder when they’re born. Other people have a history of breast cancer in their family. Other people,
uh, my father was an alcoholic, my great-grandfather was an alcoholic, my grandfather was an alcoholic, and lo and behold, I am an alcoholic. For some
people, I saw my dad beating my wife, and now I find myself beating my wife. We all live with the with the imprint of
sin. It may be slightly different in each of our lives, but we all live in our lives in a way that sin has reached
into our homes and it’s touched our innermost beings, whether we like to recognize it or not. And Jesus did not
come for the well. He came for those who are sinick in their souls. And far from looking down on the weak and the frail
and those whose lives have been blasted and blighted by sin, he paid particular attention to the broken and to the
brokenhearted. He touched the lepers. He touched the ceremony unclean woman. He embraced those children brought to him.
He said to that little girl, Jarus’s daughter, this 12-year-old girl who’s dead on the bed, he says, “Little lamb,
get up.” That’s the translation of the Aramaic there. Little lamb, get up. And she rose from the dead. Since his work
was to destroy the work of the devil, he made every effort to heal the sick and the dying.
And I thank the Lord that we have a savior such as that. And so to those who are today weighted down and living in a
society of decadence, to those today who are living in a in a society where we have a mental health crisis, the message
from this morning’s pulpit is that Jesus knows what it is to be abandoned and rejected and tortured and criminally
mistreated. And he knows what it is to be lonely and homeless. And he knows what it is to be a man of sorrows and
acquainted with grief. And he did that for you. He did it for you
because you need a savior who understands what you’ve gone through. You need a sorrow savior who is
acquainted with everything that you have gone through. And so Jesus came and lived life in a way that you know you
might say the the most painful life possible in order that we could all identify with him as our personal
savior. He didn’t just come to heal the weak and the sick. He came to reveal to us the true extent and horror of sin.
Here you see a picture of a man shackled as he con considers the consequences of his sin. He came to produce in broken
humanity and violent humanity and lost humanity a consciousness of guilt a conscious a need of our repentance to
engender faith, hope and love to God and love one to another. And while his sinless life rebuked our sins, it also
invites us to receive Christ’s righteousness and to enter into a union with God uh when with Christ who from
the first has overcome the world and who alone can save us from the wages of sin that is death. Most longer I was
chatting with somebody who was saying I have no assurance of salvation. It was a short conversation.
this person doesn’t have long and this person was saying I did this when I was young and I did that when I
was young. I said you know the book of Romans says this by one man’s transgression sin and
death came to the whole world but by one man’s obedience justification has come to all
that we are saved by the perfection of Christ not by our own perfection.
And if we look to our own lives and we look to our own pasts, we say, “Maybe God could save somebody like me because
look, look, I’ i’ve tried to live a good life, but I’ve messed up a few times.” And some people approach death itself,
and they’re consumed with a sense of their own unworthiness, their own guilt, their shame and fear, and getting guilt
from the past. And we’re invited as Christians in Romans chapter 5 not to look in the mirror, but to look at the
cross and to realize it is by one man’s righteousness and obedience that we are saved. His righteousness and his
obedience. So that’s why when we sing turn your eyes upon Jesus, not upon ourselves and to turn in faith to Jesus
because it is his righteousness that covers our unrighteousness. When God sees us, he doesn’t see our
imperfections. He sees the perfection of Christ. And so Jesus came to not just to
heal the sick, but he came to reveal the true extent and horror of sin in our
planet. He came to be a faithful high priest. There he is there. He came to be
a faithful high priest. And what does this mean? He came to reveal God to us and he came to intercede with God on
behalf of lost humanity. Jesus said to the disciples, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the father.” So Jesus came
to reveal what our heavenly father is like. And he also came so that he could be our mediator. There is one mediator
between God and man and it is the man Jesus Christ. So Jesus reveals God to us and he also brings us into the presence
of our heavenly father. That means he came to bless the people and to present himself as the atoning sacrifice to
bring reconciliation between God and man. Yes, he came to save. He came for
everybody. He came for you and he came for me. He came for lives blighted under sin. And if I just show these uh four
texts up on the screen there just to remind ourselves of what the Bible tells us, it says Jesus came to destroy the
works of the devil. And I say amen to that. And he came to take away sin.
And then 1 Timothy 1:15 says, “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into
the world to what? To save sinners. He came to save every sinner in this sinick
world.” The text he goes on, he told Zakius in Luke 19:10 again on the screen. For the son of man came to seek
out and to save the lost. That means he came looking for me and he
came looking for you. He didn’t just go go for those who could say, “Yes, Lord, I want to be saved.” He came looking
under the railroad archers. He came looking in the skid row. He came looking for the person isolated in their home.
And everybody thinks it’s a nice house, but behind the front door there’s a messed up life. Jesus came to seek out
and to save that which was lost. And I say, “Praise the Lord for that.” He’s looking for me and he’s looking for you.
Regardless of the impact of sin or the impact of this mental health crisis and all that goes with it in our society, he
knows about this crisis. He knows those who are caught up in that crisis, but he’s still coming to save those who are lost in that crisis. And so the text
goes on to say John 3:17, one of my favorite texts in the Bible. We’re all familiar with John 3:16, but John 3:17
says, “God did not send his signs to the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” So
the whole reason Jesus came was for our salvation. It wasn’t to point the finger. It wasn’t to say you’ve messed
up. It wasn’t to say, “I’m going to do better on another planet one day.” No, he came to seek and to save that which
was lost. And God sent his son into the world not to hold a mineral up to our face and say, “See how you mix messed
up?” No, he sent his son into the world in order that we might be saved through him. I never really understood how this
works until I started raising my own children. And when you have your own children and
let’s say they mess up on Monday, you don’t kind of, you know, be auction them off on eBay. You keep them for Tuesday.
Why? Because you hope and trust that Tuesday will be better than Monday. Hope springs
eternal in the heart of a parent. And so you start to understand where God sends his son into a sinick world with
all the problems that we have and sinick America in 2025. He still sends his son into this world because as far as God is
concerned, where there is life, there is hope. and he sends his son in order to win us back to him regardless of how far
we’ve sunk in sin and depravity and decadence and despair.
We also see in the scripture that he didn’t just come to heal the weak and to say to heal the sick. He didn’t just
come to look with compassion on the crowds. He didn’t just come to identify with us in our fallen um in our with all
the pains and struggles that we go through in life. He didn’t just come to be a faithful high priest to reveal God
to us and to intercede with God on our behalf. He also came to die for us. His
death was a sacrifice for sins. It wasn’t just a sacrifice for sin in general. It was a sacrifice for my sin
and it was a sacrifice for your sin as well. Every sin I’ve ever committed, that blood sacrifice on Calvary was
designed to cover that and to give me grace. The text is very clear. John the Baptist
spoke of Jesus says, “Behold the lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the
world.” Beautiful promise. Yes. Doesn’t say he’ll think about it. Doesn’t say he’ll take 95% of it away. Says he takes
away all the sin of the world. That’s what his death is able to do. He came to take away the sin of the world. Paul
spoke of Christ’s death as being sacrificial. He says in 1 Corinthians 5:7, “Christ, our Passover lamb has been
sacrificed.” And the Passover lamb was sacrificed. And when the Jews were instructed by
Moses or the Israelites in ancient ancient is Egypt, um they were told to to put the blood of the lamb that they
sacrificed on the the uh on the the lentils and the doorposts of their doors. Remember that story in Exodus
chapters 12-15. And why did they have to do that? Because uh uh in in ancient
Egyptian uh mythology, people believed that in order for you to survive into the afterlife, your name had to be
written somewhere. That’s why when Queen Hat Shepsut, very
famous queen, died, her son, who didn’t like her, he went around Egypt chiseling her name out from all the monuments
where she described it. He was erasing her from the afterlife. That’s why when Moses writes the book of Exodus, he
gives us the names of the two Hebrew midwives in Exodus chapter 1, but he doesn’t give us the name of Pharaoh.
Pharaoh has no place in the hereafter as far as Moses concerned. And what people would do in the time of Moses was they
would write their names because their houses were made of mud and straw, but the only thing that was stone was the
lintil and the doorposts of their houses. And they would write their inscribe their names on those doors. So
this is my house. And when the annual inundation of the flood ca the Nile came and all houses were washed away in a sea
of mud, people would pick up their lintil and their doorposts and reconstruct their homes around that. And
their names were written on those doorposts. And Moses says, “Blot out your name with
the lamb’s blood.” That is, you’re trusting the lamb for
eternal life. You’re not just putting your blood up there. You’re you’re covering over all the names of your
family members saying these are covered with the blood of the lamb of God. And those who trusted in the blood of
the lamb survived the night when the angel of death passed over Egypt.
And those who didn’t want to put to trust in the lamb of God slain for their on their behalf and they still had kept
the Egyptian mythology in their heads and they didn’t put the lambs. They didn’t blot out their own names. then
they would perish that night because they were choosing the gods of this world rather than the plan of salvation
that God had revealed through Moses there. So Jesus’ death was a sacrifice for our sins. Jesus was put to death for
our trespasses. Let’s make it more personal. He was put to death for my trespasses and for your trespasses. This
is very very personal. In death, it says Ephesians 5, he was a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God. And in the
sermon on in the in the Lord’s room, Lord’s supper just before he was crucified, Jesus spoke about his his his
blood being poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
Forgiveness is a beautiful thing. A society cannot function without forgiveness.
When we have a terrible event happening in any society, um the best response
from a Christian’s perspective is to publicly forgive. coming from from Northern Ireland. My my
father’s mother was in Belfast. My mother’s from the Republic of Ireland and we had the troubles in the 1970s and
‘ 80s. It was like a low-level civil war. And there were bombings going on. There were loyalists who wanted to remain British and there were
Republicans wanted to join the Irish Free State, the Republic in Dublin. And the the these tit killings went on for
over 20 years. And we euphemistically called them the troubles. But it was basically a low-level civil war that was
going on. And uh uh one year it was about 1989 or so um there was a very
infamous bombing attack in a marketplace during the market rush hour and the IRA
set it off the Irish Republican army. They were Catholics wanted to join the south and there was a man whose young go
young daughter was killed and he was a Catholic and the BBC interviewed him that night and through his tears he
offered full forgiveness to the killers of his daughter. Now that moment was kind of ingrained in
the minds of the British public that if this because this was friendly fire, she was a Catholic killed by a Catholic
bomb. If this father could choose to forgive in his moment of utter grief,
then we should be able to transcend the violence that’s around us. And a number of months later, the uh all the parties
negotiated a peace treaty called the Good Friday Peace Treaty. But it was that father forgiving his killers that
provided a mechanism for the cycle of violence to end. And time and again in American history like when that shooter
went into that church in Charlotte, Dylan Roof his name was and he shot up those people and those the relatives of
the victims came out the next day and they forgave that young man. We in America have only not descended into
civil war because certain groups have chosen to forgive time and time again. And forgiveness breaks the cycle of
violence and degradation and destruction. So Jesus’ death was for the
forgiveness of sins. It was to break the cycle of despair and self harm and abuse
and violence that we see in our world today. We also read that his death was substitutionary or some might say
vicarious. That means in our place. Some might say him for me or Jesus in my
place. But Jesus didn’t just die for sins in general, but he died in my place. and he died in your place. And so
we see these texts on the screen and I’ve put in red there um the word for. And the word for keeps appearing in
these texts. It’s just reminding us that Jesus’ death was on our behalf. It wasn’t just a death that we look at and
say that was a great thing he did. No, Jesus’ death was on my behalf. It was vicarious. It was substitutionary. Paul
says in Romans 5’8, “While we were yet sinners, he died for us.” Ephesians 5:2
he says he gave himself for us. Galatians 3:13 says he became a curse
for us. 1 John 2:2 says he is the expeation for our sins. And then the
last verse says Mark 10:45 the son of man did not come to serve but to to be served but to serve and to give his life
a ransom for many. And that word ransom, people debate what that what that verse
means, but it basically means that Jesus bought us back from slavery to sin. He
was the blood sacrifice that was paid in order that Satan might have no claim on any of us again.
Now, we don’t think of it in those terms very much, but earlier this week, I was counseling with somebody on the phone
who’s has a family that came from Haiti, and her family line was devoted to the work to to spirits. And
great-grandparents were heavily involved in the occult. And she and when the grandparents died,
that the the spirit that claims the bloodline attached itself to this lady. This is real.
And so I was talking to her about it and and she would say, “Yeah, they were offering sacrifices and as a child I’ve
offered sacrifices to these spirits to get them off my back.” I said, “But this verse tells you that Jesus gave his
life. He was the blood sacrifice to set you free from slavery to Satan. And you
need to claim that sacrifice. That blood was shed for you in order that you might no longer be a slave to sin. You might
be a slave to righteousness.” So, not only was his death um
substitutionary, it was an atoning death. We’re going some verses up there.
Atonement means reconciliation. You bring things at one once again. Um that
there has been a separation. There’s been a breakdown in the relationship and now there is reconciliation. And Jesus’
death was an atoning death. What’s interesting about his death is when two sides argue, normally both sides bear
some level of guilt and then they have to both compromise to be reconciled one to another. But Jesus who was innocent
of our sin, his death was atoning in order that the guilty party might be restored to a right relationship with
God. So Jesus’ death was an atoning death. It says there that um aside a apart from
God without the sacrifice of Jesus Luke 1:79 says that human beings we sit in
darkness. Goes on to say in Ephesians 4:18 that human beings other than the sacrifice of Jesus says we are alienated
from the life of God. Ephesians 4:18 Colossians 1:21 says we are estranged
and hostile in mind do doing evil deeds. Romans 8:7 says that we are hostile to
God. But in Romans 5:10, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son. And 1 Peter 2:24, he himself bore
our sins in his body on the tree. So his death was substitutionary. His death was
atoning. And his death was to pay the penalty for our sins. And you may summarize it in this one verse, John
3:16, which is up there. And I want to encourage you if you ever visit somebody
in the hospital and they’re dying or they’re at home dying on hospice care,
take a look at their Bible. And if you’re not sure what to read,
look for the bits that are being underlined because you know that’s what’s most meaningful to that person. Just look
through the Bible. Look for the bits that are underlined because you know that’s how the Holy Spirit spoke to them
in their past, their lives. But this verse here, John 3:16, I read it by many
bedsides as people who are perishing. For God so loved not just the world, but
let’s say Jimmy as an example that God gave his only begotten son that if Jimmy
believeth in him, Jimmy should not perish, but Jimmy should have everlasting life. It’s a beautiful
promise. Romans 5:8 says that God demonstrates to
God proved his love for us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
While we were yet a sinick planet, while we were yet a decadent and a depressed
and an anxious and a violent nation, Christ died for every citizen of our nation. He died for me. He died for you.
He died for the Christians sitting in church on Sabbath. He died for the anti Antifa protesters in Portland tonight.
He died for those who are straight. He desired desire died for those who are trans and gay.
He died for those who live in nice homes. He died for the homeless. He desired for those who have nice jobs
and letters after their names. He desired for those who live from meal to meal in soup kitchens.
It’s an amazing thing what Christ has done for each one of us. And so we should not attempt ever to say
Christ died for me, but you’re so beyond the pale, but there’s no way he died for you. We’re his ambassadors in a broken
world that nobody ever think that we’re somehow saved because of our own goodness and that we have a prior claim
on God’s goodness over and above those that society says are the outcasts of our of our nation. Christ’s death was
grounded in love for lost humanity. And all around us in our world today, yes, we see brokenness. But when we look to
Calvary, we see a love that will not let us go. A self-sacrificing love. A love
that is from everlasting to everlasting. A love that transforms sinners into saints. A love that comes to bind up the
brokenhearted, to replace strife with shalom, to replace alienation with reconciliation with our heavenly Father,
to turn despair into hope, and to turn everlasting death into everlasting life.
His death was the most significant in human history. It was for me. It was for you. It was for our neighbors. It was
for every Republican and Democrats and activists in our nation today. He
doesn’t belong just to Adventists. He doesn’t belong just to Presbyterians. He doesn’t belong just to Catholics. Jesus
came for all people. And our ministry to others, our presentation of who Jesus is
cannot be if you become like me, then Jesus maybe will love you. Is Jesus loves you as you are. And this is what
he did for me and he can do something incredible for you as well. So what do we say in conclusion today?
Well, I love this quote here from Lyall C. Rawlings. I think some of you know this quote here.
Talk about Jesus. It says, “The greatest man in history was Jesus. Had no
servants yet they called him master. Had no degrees yet they called him teacher.
Had no medicines yet they called him healer. He had no army, yet kings feared him. He won no military battles, yet he
conquered the world. He did not live in a castle, yet they called him Lord. He ruled no nations, yet they call him
king. He committed no crime, yet they crucified him. He was buried in a tomb,
yet he lives today. It’s a beautiful quote. Talks about the impact of Jesus
of Nazareth across 2,000 years as the hope and desire of the nations of our
world. Yes, we live in a broken world, but Jesus is the only solution for our
broken planet. I want to just conclude, you know, I when I when I came to America in 2007, I was very angry about
something. And if you don’t deal with your anger in a positive spiritual way, you end up getting depression
because anger, depression is often internalized anger. And I went into a
deep depression. So I know what it feels like to live to be physically present but mentally and
spiritually emotionally absent. And for two years I lived with a profound deep depression. I was a high functioning
depressive. I was doing a great job as a pastor. And I was an empty cipher.
And I knew what it was not to want to get out of bed in the morning. I knew what it was to drive under the Minnesota
skies and look up and see stars and wonder why am I here? I knew what it was to come home to a loving family and to
be physically present but emotionally absent. So I’ve had my battle with depression.
You know, don’t think that you’re somehow morally bad just because you have depression.
It can affect any of us. When people get cancer of the lungs, we say, “Oh, that’s a terrible pity. Let’s rally round.”
When somebody gets depression, we treat them like they’re a moral leper. And that’s not justified.
And I realized in the midst of this depression, you know, my wife said, “Well, you know, maybe we can go to the
doctor, see what they say.” And being a stubborn guy, so I’m not going to the doctor. They just give me pills.
And she said, “Well, let’s take a early morning walk.” I said, “That sounds good to go for an early morning walk.” But
for two years, that depression wouldn’t go away. Depression is a at first you hate it.
Then it becomes a part of who you are. Then you use it to justify your
substandard behavior of others. It becomes who you are and the disease
starts to dominate in your life and after a while you justify your poor treatment of those closest to you
because you say I have depression and you becomes an excuse for you and it also becomes an emotional crutch. So
what starts as a curse becomes like a hated friend. And so this went on for two years and I
hear my preaching about the gospel and I’m suffering from this profound depression.
And so I I eventually, you know, after two years of this, I did what I should have done at the beginning. I said,
“Lord, I need you to heal me.” Because at first I thought I can heal myself.
We all think we can heal ourselves until we realize we can’t.
And so I started reading through the Psalms, one verse each morning, not to prepare for a sermon, but because I
needed God to heal me. I needed to hear God speaking to me. I needed to know
that he loved me personally. I needed to hear the creator of the universe reach into my bre study and that 6:00 morning
study in the morning. I needed to know that he knew about me. And so I did that for about a year and a
half. I went through the Psalms one verse a day and in Minnesota we get a lot of snow
and the snow lasts from October till about May. And when the snow when when the sun
appears which is about March um when the snow appears um the snow
starts melting the the sun starts melting the snow but the snow doesn’t melt from the top down it melts from the
bottom down. If you ever see a cross-section of snow and the sun is shining, the top of the snow is clean
and and crisp, but it’s turning into kind of slush at the bottom of the of the pile. And so the snow is the snow is
melting at the bottom. And when you look at the snow out of your window from day to day, you don’t see any difference.
But from week to week, you notice that the snow pile outside your living room window, which was 5t high, has now
dropped to like 4 and 1/2 ft. Then it’s 4 feet, then it’s 3 and 1/2 ft, then 3 feet. And you you notice that when the
sun bathes that snow every day, the snow slowly dissipates.
And one day you wake up and the snow has gone and you see brown mud and you know
that in a few weeks there’ll be green grass, but all you see is like mud and you realize that the sun was melting the
the snow very very slowly. Well, that’s what happened with me.
And as the son of righteousness rose with healing in his wings, I bathed my soul with one of his words every single
morning. So the son of righteousness was doing a work of healing in me. He didn’t just remove my depression, but he took
away the causes of the depression at the same time. And that involved forgiveness. And it takes it’s a hard thing for a guy
to come to the point of offering forgiveness. But I came to the point of forgiveness. So when that point of forgiveness was reached, that’s when the
healing really took off. And I woke up one morning and the depression was gone. I thought, wait a minute, where’s it
gone? Like I I need to feel depressed today. I’m so used to my depression.
Like, where’s it gone? And so I got up out of bed and and the sun was blue and the birds was was singing and I didn’t
feel anger at them because they interrupted my sleep. And I thought, man, I something’s wrong. What’s wrong with me? Oh, my depression’s gone. And
where’s my anger? Cuz anger is like electric in your body. It’s like a white energy that goes through you. And I thought, “Where’s the anger gone?
Where’s the depression?” It was gone. And the anger was gone. The depression
was gone. I said to myself, “Something’s wrong here. Let’s just let’s just replay. Let’s just talk about what
caused the anger and hope that the depression comes back.” But it didn’t.
It was I was completely healed. and God took away the anger and he
replaced the depression with an abiding sense of his peace and his love in my life.
Now, that’s not everybody’s story. I understand that. And different people heal in different ways. But this I know
is that when the son of righteousness rises with healing in his wings, we place ourselves in his presence every
day. He does things for us that no doctor can do and no pill can do. He
heals the heart. He binds up the brokenhearted. He sets the captives free. And he enables us to walk in the
light. That is what Jesus did for me. So our sermon today is entitled dying to
live in our nation today with so much decadence and wealth.
We have an epidemic of mental health problems. And the solution is not necessarily more
pills or more social programs. The solution is for individuals to turn to the son of righteousness who alone has
healing in his wings. I want to encourage you today if you are having a battle like that. Maybe your family has
been hurt or is going through a mental health crisis right now. There probably some people here today going through that today. Um,
yes, we can work with the doctors, but ultimately there is a spiritual solution
for these problems and it’s the presence of Jesus in our lives. And my testimony
is that just as the sun melted the snow slowly, so God melted my depression
slowly. Do you know why God didn’t heal my depression overnight?
Let me tell you. Because in Minnesota, if the waters melt overnight, the water
goes into the Red River. The Red River is the only river in North America that flows north and not south.
The Red River goes around Fargo up to Lake Winnipeg, which is always frozen. That’s why whenever there’s a big
meltoff, you get this flooding around Fargo and all down the Mississippi. That’s why you don’t want a quick melt.
You want a slow melt day by day. Otherwise, the the the surge of water
brings chaos wherever it goes. And when we’ve gone through that kind of mental health crisis,
sometimes it’s best for us to have a slow healing process, for it to become grounded in our lives, for it to take
deep root, for it to allow healing and forgiveness to really flower within our
relationships and within our families. A sudden healing may be too sudden for us. So God works with us in a way that he
knows is best for us and he brings us the healing but only he can bring. So I encourage you today, you know, we’ve
talked about American society and the decadence and the despair. I want to encourage you today that the solution
for my problems and I have problems. The solution for my problems is found in looking in faith to my Lord and Savior.
Because there is no dragger, no drink of bit of bitterness and pain he has not suffered on my behalf. He knows what
I’ve gone through. He knows what I will gone through. And he has promised that he will carry all my burdens. And he can
do the same for everybody here today. So to encourage you today, we are disciples of Jesus Christ to follow him, to learn
from him, to read his teachings morning by morning and to allow the son of righteousness to rise with healing in
our lives, in our hearts, in our families, in our churches. And as it radiates out from us, it radiates out
into our wider society. May Jesus be glorified in all that we say and do. And
may he be king of our lives and lord of our hearts. This is my prayer today in his name. Amen.