Why Young Adults Leave the Church

Earlier this week, or the end of last week, I forget which, it all sort of blends together, we received a pastoral communication. It's a journal for the ministry entitled a Pastoral Communiqué, and Mr. Steve Newtsman had written a brief article entitled, Why Some Young Adults Stop Attending.

And it contained a list of reasons in that brief article, and the value of the reasons was it wasn't Mr. Newtsman coming up with reasons, but he made the specific point that these were a collection of reasons in the very own words of the young adults who had provided them.

And so there was a credibility to the form and the way these particular observations were worded. I was talking to Mr. Sexton and I said, this Sabbath, I'd like to give a response to those particular reasons. The observations that were listed in Mr. Newtsman's article are not unique to young adult members over the years.

Many have faced the very issues that we will walk through, whether they are younger or older, but it is more common to see it among those in their mid-to-late teens and those who are in their twenties. I have been through that same time period, and as I walk through the questions, there were those that resonated because I have faced the same questions and had to answer them myself as a teenager growing up in Pasadena and as a young minister in the radio church of God at that time.

The danger in questions or observations, and that list of observations carry with them a danger that is not necessarily on the surface, but the danger in questions of that sort is when we are disturbed by questions we can't answer, the questions that we can't answer then become reasons for acting. And the action in that particular case is not a good action. If we can't answer the questions, and I say we speaking more to late teens and early twenties, but to anyone else who has the same question, the sense that I am living in a contradictory world, I see issues that I can't answer, and unfortunately often the solution to that is to simply pack up a walk away from the church.

I'd like to look at those observations and walk through them in the recognition, as I said, that they can become a catalyst to leaving the church. So here are some of the reasons. The reasons listed were more than could be contained in a sermon, and I will tell you simply on the surface that this sermon will be more of a survey sermon because each of the questions in and by itself is profound, and each one of them could merit an entire sermon.

So I'd like to cover some of the reasons given for why young adults leave the church. Number one, there are a lot of good people in the world. This particular observation that troubles some of our young people is one that touches me and my family personally. We joke in my family, my wife and I, that all of my sisters are boys, and all of my daughters are boys, meaning simply that I have no sisters and I have no daughters. But I did have an aunt who I was the first of the firstborn, and she was the last of my grandparents' children, and in that I ended up with an aunt who was two years younger than I was.

And with that particular age arrangement, she was as close to a sister as anyone that I had. My grandfather died when she was probably about 12 years old. My grandmother, by her own observation, said that it took her some years to reach the place where this religion was owned by her. She admitted after my grandfather died that she had gone along with what he believed, and she was comfortable with it, and she had no reason to push against it.

And when he died, then she was left with having to ask the questions, why am I here? Why do I believe these things? What is the reason that I feel they are true? And my aunt grew up in that particular environment, graduated from high school, came to Ambassador College, graduated from college, married. She and her husband were employed by the church.

And in an economic downturn, when staff was reduced, she and her husband, where their employment was terminated, and she found a job in Pasadena and went to work. And to her surprise and shock, she found out that the people she worked with didn't have three eyes in the middle of their forehead. They were actually decent people. They were kind people. They were caring people.

She didn't have the tools to cope with it. And so the question, or the observation, of looking around and saying, you know, there are a lot of nice people in this world, was something that brought her to the place where she packed her bags and left the church.

I named some of the situations that she was involved with, and I'll walk back to those. It's unfortunate when a child grows up so sheltered, meaning so sheltered within the church of God, that they don't understand from childhood that there are good people in places other than the church. It's even worse if they grow up in a home that reinforces a we-and-they mindset. A we-versus-they mindset. A mindset that either says or implies all the good people are in the church.

The reality for those who have graduated above that level is the simple awareness that the church of God has never had a corner on good people.

And so for someone who is grounded and mature in the faith, that's not a stumbling block, because there's a simple awareness that we've never had a corner. On good people.

The problem comes down with a mind that is troubled in this area of differentiating between people who are good and people who are godly.

I was going back through my notes. I gave a sermon here in Portland in the year 2000 and another one, I think, in 2015 on this very subject. And it took more than one sermon just to cover this one particular point. So as I said, this is a survey. It is to touch points so that you have something to think about and consider and understand that there is far, far more that could be added to it.

You know one of the parables that Jesus Christ gave to shame the arrogant and the proud of his race was the parable of the Good Samaritan.

And he gave that for the very purpose of shaming and embarrassing all of those who thought most highly of themselves. The priests were at the top, the Levites were next, and in contrast to these both very proud that we're not like other people's bodies. He brought in an individual that did all the things that they should have done, but didn't, and came from the most unliked, disliked body of people in their geographical area, a Samaritan.

And so that particular parable became a contrast between somebody that you could look down your nose at as totally and completely beneath us who did all the good things we should do, and us, Christ was preaching to Jewish leadership, who didn't do the good things we should do.

But what you have to do when you read that particular parable is understand something. The good Samaritan was good, but the good Samaritan was not godly.

Now, I'm not speaking of the man. In fact, the man may be a total, fictitious individual, simply an illustration. I speak of the body of people that he represents. Turn with me to John 4. We know John 4 as the place where Jesus Christ converses with the Samaritan woman at the well. It consumes the majority of John 4. And I'm not going to read because of time constraints. We know the story. Christ was thirsty. He was by a well. A Samaritan woman came up to draw water. He said, Would you draw some water up for me? And she looked at him, rather surprised, and said, What are you doing talking to me? A, I'm a woman, so you don't talk to women. And B, I'm a Samaritan, so you certainly don't talk to me. But he talked anyway. And they talked and discussed, and they talked and discussed long enough that religion crept into their discussion.

And the age-old headbanging between Samaritan and Jew that my religion is better than your religion crept into the conversation. And the Samaritan woman could not resist putting a man in the Samaritan woman could not resist putting an elbow on Christ's ribs about her religion.

And Christ responded. And we entered the discussion at that point.

Verse 19, John chapter 4, The woman said to him, Sir, that's after she talked about her husband. He said, You don't have a husband. You've had five of those, and you have a live-in. And she said, Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.

And that's where she began to defend her religion. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.

Interesting the sensitivities that she had. She was going to bring religion into it. Christ elevated it above where she could understand. He said, Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem worship the Father. In other words, day is coming when the millennium arrives, especially when all of you—well, really, for this woman, the last great day, you'll come to understand this. But then he brought it back to the present time. He said, you worship what you do not know.

We know what we worship for salvation is of the Jews.

He made a very blunt statement to her. He said, you worship. You have a temple on Mount Gerizim that is a competitor with the temple in Jerusalem. You have the Torah, which you pride yourself because it is written in the Old Text, and our Torah is written in the New Text. It's like back when the New King James Bible came along and a really conservative Christian said, I'm more righteous than you are because I read the Old King James. It was that same sort of dynamic. And he said, you don't know what you worship. And he said, we're not going to simply say, well, whatever your way and whatever your process and whatever you do, that's all fine. He said, you need to understand something. You may worship in a temple that duplicates the one in Jerusalem. You may have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy in the old print, but salvation is of the Jews. This is what I meant when I said the good Samaritan was good, but he was not godly. The Samaritans of that day rested their case on the Torah, on the five books of the Pentateuch. They rejected the prophets. They rejected the prophets for an obvious reason. If you really absorbed Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, you knew who salvation was of and where it was from and where it was going to come back to. And that didn't fit in the Samaritan way. Now, all of this is simply an illustration to come back to a simple point. What everyone has to come to understand is that only God can define godly.

You can't go around defining godly. You can look in the world and say, you know there are a lot of good people out there, and you are absolutely positively right. But don't confuse that with godliness. In fact, you know what's interesting? If the sermon were longer, I would give you quotes from people who are of other faiths, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and others, who say, I don't want your religion because it isn't good. There are some interesting quotes from Mahatma Gandhi about his observations about Christianity, and they're not very complementary about the people.

Your prophet is quite a prophet. Your people are not a good people.

I came from a family that would probably be described in our society as a good family. But I have shared with you before that we didn't understand godly. I've shared with you multiple times while I was pastoring Portland about coming from Caldwell, Idaho, over the grapevine down into College Place and over to Walla Walla to visit my grandparents, and coming through College Place on Saturday and seeing people going to church and asking my mother, why are they all dressed up and going to church? And my mother's saying, Bobby, they don't know any better. And so, when I was six, seven, eight years old, I'd shake my head in sadness at all these people that were dressed up like we are today, going to church on Saturday, and these poor people didn't know any better. You know, one of the things that made a punctuation mark, exclamation, in the time when God called us to conversion was, we didn't know the difference between good and godly. We may have tried to be good people, but we were not godly people, because we didn't know what godly was defined as. You know, if you look at the world around us, the Apostle Paul made a beautiful statement of his contemporary world that you can do a cut and paste on top of our world. It is that classic statement in Romans 10 verse 2, where he spoke of his people, the Jews, and he said, quote, that they have a, quote, a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.

Did they try to be good? Yes. Did they try to obey? Yes. Did they do what they knew to do? Yes. But he said, they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.

In a very eloquent message, Romans 9 through 11, he said, are they lost because of that? And he said, absolutely not. But they're blinded for now so that you who are in the church may be called, but they will not be lost, meaning simply, their day is not today.

I've not sprung in my lifetime for very many movie DVDs. In fact, I have probably only been willing to spend money to buy two, three, maybe at the most four DVDs of a movie. Because I felt it was worth something that I'd want to keep. One of those is entitled, and it's probably not the complete title, but the title is The Scarlet and Black.

And from the first time I saw it, it moved me powerfully because it is a story about a Monsignor stationed in the Vatican during World War II who put his own life and the life of some of his other Vatican priests in jeopardy by helping ferry Jews out of Rome when the order came to ship all the Jews in Rome to concentration camps. When his fellow priests was killed, tortured to death, in prison, he escaped miraculously a number of times. Eventually, when the war was over, the commandant who had ordered the transportation of Jews to the concentration camps was put in prison for a life sentence there in Rome. And the sequel of the story touched me as much and as powerfully as anything within the story itself because it said, this priest who was hunted at every single solitary move by that commandant visited that commandant in prison every single solitary week.

And I believe it was for the rest of his life. And before that commandant died, that priest had a chance to administer the Catholic form of baptism and conversion.

That man's on a polar opposite end of where we are in terms of theology.

But if you want to label a man a good man, I can't see too many things that I can look at that were any more good than what he did.

Good and godly are not the same thing. So as a teen or a young adult wrestles with, you know, I've met at work or I've met at school or I've met here or there, some really, really fine people. Be grateful.

I am grateful for every good neighbor that I have.

You know, it's a delight. We've had a recent spate of sales in our neighborhood. My next-door neighbor across the street is moving right now so that somebody new moving in. And as we drove to church, my wife said, I hope we get a good neighbor. Next to that neighbor is an excellent neighbor. Across the street is an excellent neighbor. A couple of houses down, an excellent neighbor. Good people. Really good people.

But they're not godly because only God can define godly.

The second point that was brought up, we see people outside the church doing the right thing and being blessed. This particular complaint has puzzled me for many, many years.

I'll just put it, I'll put it, you'll bear with me, brethren, I'll put it in a little bit of an in-your-face form. Do you think you own God? Which pocket do you keep God in? You know, we got to get the whole thing turned right side up. God owns us. We don't own God.

God can bless whoever He wants to bless.

He doesn't have to sit down and say, well, let me see your ID. Oh, nope, you're not in the church. I can't bless you. Doesn't work that way.

Go back to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and look at all the healings that were done and ask how many of those people were in the church. And the answer was zero.

Because the church didn't start until Acts 2.

And some of them, the sense is, that other than having Christ heal them, they never made contact with Christ again. We have to stop and understand something, brethren, as I said. We don't own God.

He isn't the property of the church of God. The church of God is the property of God. Turn with me to Romans 2.

Look at the Scripture we're going to read in the context of people being blessed.

Romans 2, verses 11 and 12 say the following, There is no partiality with God. For as many as have sinned without law will perish without law, and as many as have sinned in the law will be judged by the law.

He says, I am totally and completely impartial.

Now, I'm assuming that all Bibles textually are written the same way. So if you look at Romans 2, 11 through 15, you will notice at the beginning of verse 13, there is a parentheses. And it goes all the way to the end of verse 15.

So verses 13, 14, and 15 are an inset. They're a parenthetical comment.

And it stands distinct and separate from verses 11 and 12 and verse 16. I want you to note the parentheses, verse 13 through 15. For not the hearers of the law are just in the sight of God, but the doers of the law will be justified. For when Gentiles who do not have the law, by nature do the things contained in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves. Who show the works of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing them witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or either excusing them.

You know what, brethren? You can go to some of the most primitive societies in the world, and they hold ethically to some of the things within the Ten Commandments.

And the societies that they have enjoy the benefits that come from respecting those things.

So, as Paul was saying, there's no partiality with me. If a Gentile who has absolutely no knowledge of my laws, just because—we'll use the term—just because it is common sense to him or her says, this is the way I should act, and this is the way I should live, and they do so, they will have the benefit of doing that. I was reading an article in the Columbian last week that talked about the significant financial burden that exists within a single-person household, whether it's a single parent who has custody of their children, or a husband and wife where one dies and leaves the other, and how much more difficult it is to maintain the life and maintain a standard of life when there's only one instead of two.

Every widowed person understands that. Every widow or widower understands the difference that takes place. Every divorced person understands that particular thing. And so, in that particular sense, let's say when somebody has control over the situation, when they determine that upon marriage I will stay married, and both parties abide by that, there is an unconscious financial blessing that comes with the arrangement, that isn't there when that arrangement is severed. And so, Christ was saying, embedded in what I teach are blessings that are not even apparent on the surface. But when you commit to something, you receive those blessings. He also said, if you ignore them, you suffer the consequences. He used the term either excusing or accusing the practitioner.

The third reason it was given is I see hypocrisy in the church.

You know, I reflect upon that one because I began attending church two months before my 14th birthday. Up to that point in time, I went to churches that had no connection whatsoever with the Church of God. So, I had a chance to see 13, almost 13 full years of the church that I grew up in and other churches in the community that I attended. And from 14, began attending. You know, when it comes to posturing, there's probably no place where people postured hypocritically more so than Pasadena, because you had more people you wanted to impress. You know, the fewer people you want to impress, the less hypocrisy you have to practice. The more people you have to impress. And so, I grew up in an environment, and you know as a teenager growing up in that environment, you're invisible. People will say things and do things in front of you because you're not big enough to be significant. And it's really interesting. You're like the invisible man walking around. You say, now that's interesting. That's interesting conduct. That's an interesting statement, and I don't mean interesting in a positive way. So, I reflect back to that time, and I'm also aware because I've been there, done that, there's no more idealistic period in human life than the teens and the 20s.

Teens and 20s can see hypocrisy better than anyone else, because God built it as part of the beauty of life that when you hit your mid-teens and into your early 20s, all the dreams and all the visions and all the goals and all the aspirations of life are there, and you just can't wait to get a hold of them. There's a freshness there. There's an idealism there, and when people act contrary, there's no place in life where you're more sensitive to and quicker to see hypocrisy than that particular time in life. I find it also interesting that even though it is the time in life where people are the most capable of seeing hypocrisy, it is also the time in life where they are the poorest judges of hypocrisy. It's not a good combination. A time where they have the greatest skill and ability to see it, and the poorest ability to evaluate it. I look at 60-some years in the Church of God, and I can tell you from dealing intimately with people for 50 of those years, that there are very few hardcore hypocrites in the Church of God.

And I'm not saying that as the Pollyanna. I'm not saying that as somebody who's naive. You know, a hardcore hypocrite is somebody who sees a goal and destination and says, come, you know what, or high water, I'm going to get there, and I will step on anybody to get there, and I will play whatever game, and I'll put on whatever mask I have to do to get there. And I have no compunctions and no feelings about it. In 60 years, I've seen very, very, very few people of that description.

I've seen far more weak Christians who don't think through what they're doing, who live in the moment, not considering the implications of their conduct, and as a result, allow somebody who's standing on the side to look at them and see contradiction between what they say they believe and what they practice.

I've also been fascinated over all the years of a reality that I wish weren't true, but it is. Our judgments, our actions, and our deeds are governed more by our emotions than by our intellect. Emotions trump logic over and over and over and over and over again. And so intellectually, with your head, you can intellectually know and say what is right, but when emotion cranks up to a certain level, emotion will govern. And if somebody sees that, what do they see? Well, they see the perception of hypocrisy. You say up here, this is what you believe, but I just saw what you did. I still have burned in my memory an action from when I was an early teenager of somebody who was very high in authority, acting at a point of very high emotion and saying something that disturbed me profoundly, not just then, but for years and years and years afterward. And it wasn't until I reached a place in age where I was comparable to age and circumstance that they were, that I was willing to cut them some slack and understanding in the emotion of that moment they said something they really should not have said. What every teen and 20 year old needs also to understand is there is nobody free of hypocrisy.

If there is a young adult who stands and says, I have never done anything hypocritical, they're not honest. They're simply not honest.

Nobody is free of having done something hypocritical.

Let's go sideways. Let's go into the Bible. Ask you a loaded biblical question. Was the Apostle Peter a hypocrite? We're going to pick guys that are going to sit in judgment on 12 thrones under David ruling in the Millennium. You can't get any higher in position or office than these guys. Was Peter a hypocrite? Yes, he was. Yes, he was. So much so that in Galatians chapter 2, the Apostle Paul called him out.

Galatians chapter 2, verse 11, But when Peter had come to Antioch, I withstood him to his face because he was to be blamed.

For before certain men came from James, he would eat with the Gentiles. But when they came, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. And the rest of the Jews also played the hypocrite with him, so that even Barnabas was carried away with their hypocrisy.

Was Peter a hypocrite? Yeah. Do you notice the way it spoke of Barnabas? It was emotional, wasn't it? The pressure of it, and Paul, in the way he writes this, insinuates that, where he says even Barnabas was carried away with their hypocrisy.

Given time to think about it, given a time without all the pressure around him, Barnabas wouldn't have done that, is what Paul is saying. But he got caught in the group pressure of it all, and he bent, and he played the hypocrite also.

You know, this is the same Peter that baptized the first Gentile convert, Cornelius.

This is the same Peter, and it took some backbone, who stood up before the Church of God in Jerusalem and defended the baptism of the very first Gentile convert.

That wasn't an easy thing to do. You see, that was a golden moment when Peter was anything but a hypocrite. This was a weak spot when Peter was a hypocrite. Was Peter a hypocrite by lifestyle? No. Not in your wildest imagination. Peter got caught in an emotional situation at a time when everything was new enough that he did something stupid. Now, when you read the life of Peter before his conversion, doing something stupid wasn't uncommon for Peter.

You know, God recorded in the Bible a number of times that Peter did something in emotion. Peter was a go-getter, and he was an emotional man. And every once in a while, he did something without thinking first, and it wasn't the thing he should have done. That was a young adult. I don't think any of you would write Peter off.

But you do have to understand the difference between somebody who is a hypocrite and somebody who succumbs to a hypocritical action. And they're not the same thing. Romans chapter 7.

Romans chapter 7 is where the rubber meets the road. This is real life.

The apostle Paul describes where all of us live.

And if you take the issue on the table right now, I see hypocrisy in the church, and you plant it right in the middle of what I'm going to read to you.

What you're going to see is not hypocrisy, but you're going to see the challenge that comes for those of us who are carnal by birth, carnal by nature, who now have God's Spirit, and the war goes on between that spirit and that carnal nature. You know, Paul begins in verse 14. He says, For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold unto sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice, but what I hate, that I do.

What word describes what I've just read to you in the cynical mind, hypocrisy.

Ying yang, this is what I want to do, this is what I do do.

If then I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good, meaning I can sit academically and say, this is the way I should live, and then I get myself in a awkward situation, and I do something totally different. Then I sit down and I feel guilty because this is what I stand for and what I believe, and this is what I did. He said, but now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me, meaning what makes us human. We want to please people. That's what got Peter in a pickle there. In Antioch, we want to please people. Other times it's, well, I don't want to be embarrassed. There are times where it's as innocent as I got caught off guard, and I didn't have time to think it through. Verse 18, but sin that dwells in me. We all understand Paul writes in such a way, as Peter said, our brother Paul writes in ways that are hard to understand.

If you look at your normal carnal poles, they go one direction. If you look at your conversion and what you believe, it goes a different direction. And they war against each other. And sometimes, where you want to be doesn't win the war. And that's what Paul is talking about.

As I look at a lifetime of experience, I am far, far, far less likely to call somebody a hypocrite.

I understand hypocritical actions. When I read Romans 7, I can look in the mirror and I can see myself. I have to laugh at times. If you live in a vacuum, if you live in a cloistered monastery and you have your cell and you only come out for vespers and a meal, you can probably avoid hypocracy pretty good. If you punch a clock every day on Monday and you punch it at the end of the day and you do that five days and you go home, it's easier to avoid hypocrisy than if you're the manager. And if you're the manager, it's easier than if you're the owner.

And you know, we give politicians a bad time, and often they deserve it.

But people who are in governance probably have the most difficult walk to walk without being hypocritical. One of the things God teaches us is that there are levels of understanding of how to do and what to do that are really above us. And He teaches us to respect that. And Paul was walking through some of that in Romans 7. The fourth thing on the list that I took from Mr. Knutzman's article in the pastoral communique is one that I'll have to break down into thirds.

We think we're the only true church, and the rest are pagan. We think we're better than others.

Oh, that's actually three faces. So, let me cover each one of them.

We think we're the only true church. You know, we're in somewhat the same bailiwick as we were in the good versus godly.

The bottom line of the whole thing is, when it comes to true church, God is the only one that has the right to do the defining. I can't define true church. You can't define true church. It doesn't belong to you. You know, God says the church is mine. Christ said, I will build my church. So, ownership belongs to God and Christ. You and I are not given the permission or the responsibility to do the defining in this particular case. If God commanded the Sabbath at creation, I rested on the seventh day. You rest on the seventh day.

And a few thousand years later, atop a smoking mountain, thunders down to Israel, a reminder of what He told them at creation, honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

Man does not have the authority to make that change.

I've long ago forgotten even where the quote was, but in the 1800s, a Roman bishop in the United States was taunting Protestants for keeping Sunday. And he says, you have no biblical basis for keeping Sunday. He said, Sunday exists because of the authority of the Catholic Church. And if it were not for the authority of the Catholic Church and the power of the papacy to change the day, you would be meeting on Saturday. So, he was taunting Protestants, saying, you have no basis for keeping Sunday. And he was dead right. The holy days were given to be kept forever. We just came back from the Feast of Tabernacles, and if at your site somebody didn't read from Zechariah 14 about when the millennium starts, everybody will come up year to year. And if they don't, I'm going to cut off their reign. And if they don't come up still, I'll cut off other things. And it's not going to be a very long process before people say, it's a whole lot less painful to go to the Feast of Tabernacles than to stay home.

Whether someone likes it or not, the true Church is identified by doing what God commands. It's just that simple. What does God command? Who does what God commands?

God is doing the defining.

I realize in various geographical areas, in various times in history, people in congregations, elders or pastors, may have set a tone and a mood that should not have been set.

And so, just simply to take you back farther than I think any of the rest of you can go, in terms of where the buck stops, you know, as old as Portland is, and this area, there are people who've been in the Church longer than I. I don't know there is anybody in this area that has been in the Church longer than I at headquarters. And so, from a headquarters perspective, it was never taught that we are the, quote, only true Church.

We had a fellow Church of God that didn't like that we called them Sardis.

And in even earlier years, churches that I won't mention, we looked at as possibly still true Church, but having strayed considerably.

If you would attribute something to Mr. Armstrong, it would probably be that he focused on one era of the Church and its description that it had remained faithful, while six eras of the Church had all had some compromising element to their religion. And that's what Revelation 2 and 3 points out. Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Philadelphia, Laodicea, they're all Church of God.

Six out of the seven, God shook his finger and said, you're the Church of God and you're not doing what you should be doing.

We have never taught that one corporate body. At that time, I was a member of the Radio Church of God that later changed its name to Worldwide Church of God. I have never been in the Church of God in 60-some years, where at the top, leadership said, this body right here? One and only. So, if a young person has been led to think that's the way we think, I'd like to disabuse you of that way of thinking, because it isn't who we are.

The second aspect of that is the rest are pagan. You know, I know when members of the Church talk, or families talk, they can get sloppy with their vocabulary. And I'm very, very well aware of the fact that in that sloppiness, that particular charge can be put on the table. We need to look at it for what it is. It is a sloppy broad brush. And if it's a part of your vocabulary, you need to change your vocabulary.

The people who populate the churches of our nation in the Western world are like the Jews of Romans 10, verses 1 and 2 that I read earlier. Many of them have a zeal for God without a complete knowledge of what it is that God requires of them. I wasn't raised a Mormon, but all my mother's family are Mormons. My Mormon cousins have, quote, more zeal for God than—I'll use the broad brush if you'll give me liberty—than anyone I know in the Church of God. And by that I mean this. The majority of them have gone around the world to wherever they were assigned on mission as a young adult. Two years of their life that they give, just like the young men that you see walking down the street in black pants and a white shirt, maybe a backpack on the back, and you say, there goes a Mormon missionary. Well, they send them to the South Seas Islands. They send them to all of Asia. They send them to all of Europe. They serve two years, and the entirety of that two years is on their own nickel. They aren't sent there and supported. They and their families work to put aside enough money to support them for two years while they serve the Church. That's a zeal. My house backs up to the parking lot of a Salmon Creek Mormon Church. There are times at 6 o'clock in the morning I hear a door slam, and I say, okay, the Mormon teens are there for church education. Parking lot's full of cars. They're in there going through church education before they go to their first high school class of the day. As Paul said, and I use that as a group for one reason, because it's one I know. Each of us know the faith we came from. Mr. Sexton will talk to you about the Lutheran faith and areas that he has experienced. These are areas where I have experienced. And I just simply pointed out as not unique, but as an illustration. That said, that said, you can't avoid the simple reality. With all the zeal, with all they do, and with all their devotion, much of what they believe and practice has a pagan origin. It just simply is what is. I was rummaging through my humor file, and it's probably just as good I didn't find it, because I'm not sure I wouldn't have bridged copyright rights to make the quotations. I have more than one Sunday funnies pointing out the pagan origin of Christmas and Easter. I won't tell you the strips, lest I get in trouble with the cartoonist. But these are nationally known Sunday cartoons that appear before Easter and before Christmas, where the cartoonist is making fun of Christmas and Easter, and the pagan origin of the eggs and the bunnies, and the tree, and all the rest. And they don't have any stake in the game. They're not members of the Church of God. They just simply are recognizing the fact that's a fact. These days are not Christian in origin, never have been, and never will be. A number of the core doctrines of the Christian world do not originate from Jerusalem, from Christ, from the apostles, from the first-century Church. The immortality of the soul is not a first-century Christian doctrine. An eternally burning, tormenting hell has never been a part of Christian theology. Heaven is the reward of the saved, infant baptism, and the hallmark, the litmus test of the Christian world. Belief in the Trinity are all pagan in origin.

So, as I said, you walk a line that you need to respect, to simply point at everybody and say, well, all the rest are pagan. It's not a fair, and it's not a wise, and it's not a generous or compassionate place to be. But you're dishonest not to recognize that a whole string of the core beliefs do not come from the Bible. They come from and originate in pagan religions that pre-date Christianity. The last of the items we think we are better than others. This is a whole sermon in itself because it has multiple facets. So, as I said, it's one of those cases where we give you the survey, where we give you the gloss.

Let me start by answering for myself. You know, you can answer for yourself, I can answer for myself. It's hard for any of us to answer for the we. Okay?

On the personal level, this statement is not true.

If a young adult were looking at me and they took the we out and they looked at me in the face and put you in the place, you think you're better than others. I would simply look in the back in the face and say, you don't know what you're talking about. You simply don't know what you're talking about.

Some in the Church of God feel better than others.

I can't answer for anyone else. I can answer for me.

I know this. I know there's not a category of living outside of doctrine where I can't find someone who's better than I am. You take every other single category of life.

I can find somebody that is superior to me.

So I don't live in a world, and I think many of you are in the same boat. I think many of us are paddling in the same canoe. We're not naive enough to think that I'm the greatest, the mostest, and the bestest. That's not the case. Why are you in this Church?

I'll give you an answer that we had in college, and it's not complementary. In college, we said, God called the cream of the crud.

I gave a sermon back a while ago entitled, Hemnesia. Did you practice it on the first hymn that Mr. Albright led today? I elbowed my wife, and I said, he couldn't have chosen a better song for the sermon if I had gone up and asked him, Nathan, would you lead that particular psalm? Not many wise men now are called. Not many noble brethren. Not many mighty ones.

Go back through that hymn. God said, basically, I called the cream of the crud.

I didn't call the mighty. We share one thing in common with Annapolis, West Point, and the Air Force Academy. You can't get here without an appointment. You know, it doesn't matter what your GPA is, it doesn't matter what all your credentials are. If you apply for West Point, Annapolis, or the Air Force Academy, a member of the Senate or House has to recommend you. And without that recommendation, you will never get into one of those. Now, the difference is, when you look at the credentials along with that recommendation to get into those, they are way above what God is giving us credit for. So, the analogy only works as far as appointment. John 644 says, No one can come to me unless the Father draws him. You're here by appointment. If you didn't have the appointment, you wouldn't be here.

So, it's not about being better. It's not about being superior. It's about an appointment.

What's the bottom line of 1 Corinthians 1, 26 through 29? The hymn that we sing in the name of Jesus Christ. What is the bottom line?

I called the people in the Church of God for this reason, quote, that no flesh should glory in His presence. God says, if I call people who can look in the mirror and say, what in the world did God call me for? Then they won't be strutting around saying, boy, did God get a real present when He called me. Did He realize what a bonus He got by calling me? He said, No, I'm going to call people who can look in the mirror and say, why did He call me? What did He see? For what reason? That no flesh should glory in His presence. And you know what the other reason was? There were two reasons in 1 Corinthians 26 to 29. To confound the mighty. To confound the noble. To take those people who have an IQ that would make us dizzy, who have business acumen that could buy and sell us a hundred times over with pocket change. And I could go on with all the superlatives who would look and say, what in the world did you call Him for? And when the kingdom comes and you shine with all the glory of the sun and somebody finds out what your background or your origin was and sit there and say, how in the world that no flesh should glory if you're in the church and to confound the mighty if you're looking at the church from the outside. So the charge that we think we're better than others, if you do, you do. I don't know what to say. You're out of touch with reality. So if a young person sees an adult and says, well, they think they're better than everyone else, well, shame on that adult. And in most cases, I hope it's a misread from the teen or the young adult.

Brethren, that's a survey of some of the points that Mr. Neutsman covered. If you're a younger person, if you're in your teens or 20s or even if you're older and you wrestle with the issues that I put on the table this afternoon, talk to Mr. Sexton. Talk with one of your trusted elders. You know, sit down with Mr. Reeves. Sit down with any elder. If you have questions about the sermon, I'm more than happy to sit down and talk to you. Take advantage of the wisdom gained by those who have wrestled with this particular topic so that you may have a firm foundation in the Church of God.