Shall we pray? Father, we thank you that we have the privilege of this morning, of worshiping, and of praising the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we stand and by whom we stand. Indeed, He is worthy of our souls best praise. We pray that your spirit would guide and speak to each one of our hearts, guide what is said.
Help us to consider well your word in Jesus' name, Amen. This morning I want to speak to you about personhood and by way of background. I have been speaking in recent months about the idea of prophet and of priest and of king. These are wonderful truths that come throughout the Bible from beginning to the end that pertain to the Lord Jesus Christ.
And the idea of a prophet is, we might say, related to the information, to the actual truth that is in the Bible. One of the popular words that bothers me quite a bit is the word narrative and how it is being used in universities and in society. Well, what you believe is your narrative. That is your narrative.
And what I believe is my narrative. What is that ever irritate me? As far as I know, you know, if you watched that movie of some years ago, The Princess Bride, there's a narrator in the back explaining what is going along as this funny story proceeds. And the story is a complete fiction.
It is a complete nonsensical funny story with a narrator. Yes, I suppose that's a narrative that has nothing to do with what I believe. I believe something that is called the Bible that is historically correct. It is history.
It is fact. It tells us what God has said often through his prophets. Sometimes to the point of saying, this is what God says. People like Jeremiah said this.
And we can see in the panorama of history through the Bible how God has dealt with the human race and how the human race has responded. So I think that is something that is in, you might say, in our favor, in the Christian faith in that we have a historical grounding in what we believe. This is not some narrative that somebody made up. The idea of priest.
I spoke perhaps a month or so or more ago about anointing. And as has been pointed out by theologians, this is in fact, this aspect of our faith is unique to our faith in that in terms of worship, in terms of the empowering of ourselves to worship God, God gives the believer his spirit. That's a wonderful truth. For Peter 2 talks about that we are a nation of kings and priests of priests.
We are enabled to enter into that holy place of worship. And we enjoy the presence of the Spirit of God within us in order to genuinely worship God and in order to be changed by God, prophet and priest. John chapter 4, the Lord Jesus interacted as you may remember in that chapter, the woman at the well. That is what that chapter is referred to.
Verse 26, God seeks those who worship Him how? In spirit and in truth. It is not only the subjective aspect of worship. We might call the spiritual aspect.
It is the informational correctness of our redemption. What is the basis for it? We have the record. But it is not only cold, dead religion, information.
It is spiritual truth. And the Bible uses the picture of anointing, spiritual anointing that God would actually give the believer as it were some of himself to enable us to enter into a proper relationship with Him. That is unique to what we believe. Our faith is based on historical fact.
Our faith is based on spiritual empowerment as the Lord Jesus promised in John chapter 14. And in those two regards, that is a unique, a completely unique body of belief. And those two things then lead to the possibility of legitimate Christian experience. The modernists might say, well, the truth and the anointing inform our experience, another popular word.
But it is more than that. For the believer, the truth and the anointing are the intellectual and heart-based power for us to live as Christians and to have a legitimate and true and honest Christian experience. What word have I left out? That has to do with lordship in the context of our experience.
Life is full of choices, choices and choices and choices day in and day out, hour by hour. We are faced with choices. And we are faced with strivings. And sometimes for the believer, we enter into Romans eight groanings that we cannot even utter.
We cannot adequately express our need to God. And so we have the promise in Romans eight that God will come beside us, that His spirit will enable us to utter the things which we cannot utter. I wonder if you have been in that place of such need that you need the help of God to pray without words. But that is part of your birthright, the second birthright, born again birthright, to be able to pray even sometimes without words that groaning of Romans eight.
So struggle is inevitable. Struggle is even mandated for the believer in the Bible. There is no nirvana. Buddhism likes to talk about nirvana.
I should get tired of hearing the word karma. Another modern word. Very dead end. I talked to a lawyer who was a Buddhist for a good hour a few weeks ago.
A very difficult to elucidate, a very difficult to enunciate religion. You don't even know when you've arrived. You can't even define what it means to have arrived. It was a frustrating conversation in some respects.
The history of Western philosophy is quite interesting. And one of the famous philosophers reminds me of my father. His name was Soren Kierkegaard and he lived in the late 1800s, I guess. And he was a Dane, like my father.
And he grew up in a doctorate in a Lutheran home where religion was about to do's and don'ts and very strict. And my father grew up under a foster father who was very cold and who damaged my father, I believe, emotionally quite a bit. My mother has said that it wasn't for my step-ant, his step-sister that my father would have been a total wreck as a result of the doctrinaire coldness of his father. And Soren Kierkegaard grew up in that kind of cold religious, national Lutheranism is the national religion of denomination of Denmark.
I remember when we were there, some years ago, the people that we were staying with, not being believers, they said, well, the church is, by the way, you pay a tax to maintain all these historic churches. It comes right out of your paycheck. Interesting. And she said, only old people go there.
And the only reason we use the building is for boy scouts. This is the state to which it has come. It is an empty sanctuary on Sunday mornings, largely speaking. And of course, that is quite true of many cathedrals and so on in Canada, as you know.
And so in that kind of a context, you have a man like Kierkegaard coming out and saying, you know what really matters is not the information of your faith. It is not the history of your faith. It is not the doctrine of your faith. It is what you choose to do.
It is how you act. And in some regard, the Christian says, yes, yes. My king, my lord, needs to be lord of my life, hour by hour, yes. But what Kierkegaard did along the way is to throw out the informational content of the Bible.
And as a result, you have what is known as existentialism. He is considered to be one of the fathers of that philosophy. It is a bankrupt philosophy. Because if you have nothing on which to make a decision moment by moment in terms of either information or the Holy Spirit, neither one of those things, I submit to you that you are lost.
You are lost. It is important what you choose. But what do you believe? What do you believe in your heart?
What do you believe in your mind? It is very important, contrary to existentialists or Kierkegaard. There is, I believe, an advantage that the Christian enjoys that he takes for granted. And that advantage is, as you saw from the first slide, the title of my message, the idea of my message is personhood, personhood.
This is something we take for granted. So let us look at this passage, which is so foundational to the idea of personhood. And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle.
And over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image. And the image of God created him, male and female created he them. Foundational truth about personhood.
And then we get information about the fact that man is a special creation. And the Lord formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And man became a living soul. In the image of God, breathed into this reformed matter, this dust, the breath of life from God himself becoming a living soul.
This in fact, of course, must be the foundation of personhood, something that we all take for granted. You are a person. I am a person. What does that even mean?
Well, people have done a great deal of thought about that. So my message this morning is three times three ABC, each having three parts. Part one of part A, the idea that God created us, mind, emotions will, the soul in place in a body and gave us the breath of life from himself, the animals, the breath of life from man, special creation from himself. Very interesting kind of personhood.
So I don't know if you remember, there was a series on TV, little snippets of things. And this was sort of Canadian moments. And you may remember on the little clip that the person on the operating table said, I smelled burnt toast. David Spidell knew the words coming out of my, this person was having open brain surgery.
And Dr. Wilder Penfield was mapping the brain, stimulating different parts of the brain. So I'm reading the case for the creator and I think it's the last chapter is dealing with personhood. And he quotes Penfield and I'll show you a JP Morehouse.
And he hits exactly what he did. He could, I've actually, my father actually had to film this. When my late father was alive, he actually was a film editor and they would call him over to the medical school at Mon. And I was glad that it was in black and white because I'm squeamish.
And so in this film that my father was personally present for and had to drill a hole, hole, hole, hole, hole, around, feet in the little saw, connect the holes, do it again. I don't know if they still do it that way. Lift the whole top of the person's head off. Perhaps remove the tumor or whatever the nature of the neurosurgery was.
And I watched this film with a little two hand thing. You look in the thing and you turn the film, decide what you're going to keep. And while Penfield would do this and then he would be able to map the brain and he would touch this part in that part and the arm would go, the leg would go. Interesting that, that on the table a person would say, I didn't do that.
Dr. Penfield, you did that. What? That means that you have a awareness that transcends what you are in.
He commented the patient thinks of himself as having an existence that is separate from his body. We take this for granted. What about JP Morehouse? Started out as a chemist, studied philosophy, studied theology, professor at Talbot in California.
So what that boils down to is a scientist could know more about what is happening in my brain than I do. He could find every neuron firing in every synapse closing in every little electrical spark and where they're happening and where they're not happening. But he cannot know more about what is happening in my mind than I do. He wants to know that.
He has to ask me. I love that. You want to know what's going on in my mind? You have to talk to me.
It's most interesting. Second aspect of this body-mind spirit that we should be conscious of and I think that is something that should characterize the Christian. A basic attitude of gratitude. Are you glad to be alive this morning?
I tell you I'm glad to be alive. People joke it worked. I know it's better than the alternative. You have to put my pants on all by myself this morning.
You say things like that. It's a gift. Life is a gift. We can revel in that.
We can know that it is a gift from God. Psalm 139, 14, I will praise thee for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are they works and that my soul knoweth right well. This double, as it were consciousness.
Do you know the word conscience comes from consviente so con is along with and scinte as knowledge. Knowledge along with your conscience. This is from God. You have this double awareness.
David had this kind of double awareness and he was aware that his his makeup was beyond expression, fearfully and wonderfully made. This is written a thousand years before the arrival of the Lord Jesus Christ and three thousand years before the discovery of your genetic code of DNA. I wonder what King David would have thought if he could have conceived of the chemistry of the DNA. You're right.
You don't know how right you were and are. How fearfully and wonderfully made we are. I trust that your soul knows that right well. Number three, sanctity.
Chatting with you, isn't it? Rather sobering and kind of scary. The kinds of messages that you when days children and my grandson and others are going to be exposed to in this Canadian society. It's scary.
The world's thrashes around with all kinds of questions and problems about the person and what is unfit to look at and what is holy and what is your sanctuary. You live. God has given you the gift of life and there's a sense in which your body is your prison but it is also your castle and we know to treat others that they have their personal body and they have their space. This is part of the assumed sanctity of personhood that is built into society.
I know a professor at Memorial and she's not a Christian but the reason she believes in God, I can think of a lot of reasons to believe in God but the funny reason that she believes in God is how ornate human beings address themselves. No animal, she's animal don't do that. You don't see animals putting clothes on and putting lipstick on it. Right?
We have a sense of personhood, the sanctity of our space. The believer should know that better than anybody. Don't you love this verse. I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice acceptable unto God which is your reasonable service.
The means, the physical means by which we can serve God is actually can be considered a sacrifice to God. There is a sense of Christian sanctity of the person there and in terms of our relationships and congregation be kindly affectioned to one another with brotherly love in honor preferring one to another honoring each other respecting each other's space and being in personhood. This should be part of the Christian understanding of sanctity, the sanctity of the person body, mind and spirit. He breathed into us and that lawyer that I was chatting with who said he studied Buddhism for many years.
We got into this discussion and I don't know how it started but it quickly somehow went under God's guidance I believe to my belief that we are created and you wouldn't believe how fast he ran from that idea. I think I know why. One of the reasons why this world is so against creationism if you can call it that and the idea that we are a special creation of God is that it automatically implies that we are accountable to our creator. Buddhism has a lot of even told me that I knew Buddhism really has virtually no clear definition of sin.
That's very convenient. No definition of sin, no creator. This is going to be very woolly nebulous stuff and so it is. But in fact we are accountable to the one who has made us.
I don't know whether you caught any of the discussion in the media about the attempt by I think it was it was over a dozen philosophy professors in North America two of whom are at my upper campus and they made a legal representation to the court to have chimpanzees declared as persons. So two of the people who are in my same you know you could say callies have made formal representation that a chimpanzee should be designated a person and their motivation for that was that these two particular chimpanzees in the states are being mistreated. Well the Bible actually tells us in the penitentop not to mistreat animals. Isn't that good enough for you?
They say that the intellect of a chimpanzee is that of a three year old. That's interesting. I mean I think my two year old grandson is kind of a smart fellow. So add another year onto that and you're talking about an adult chimpanzee in terms of analytical power.
Interesting. But if you read further on chimpanzees what you find is that they are amoral. Those of you who know more biology than I do will know for example that when the head of a lion pride takes over the offspring of the pre outgoing one will be killed. Those lion kittens will be destroyed by the incoming I don't know what the word is for the head of a pride of lions.
That's just biology. I'll tell you something interesting about chimpanzees. Chimpanzees might there was a troop living on this mountain and there's another troop living on that mountain and people like Jane Goodall have documented the fact that just what they do some of them will go and say we're going over to the other troop on the other mountain and we're going to kill their children. We're going to kill those chimpanzee babies.
They don't know why. It almost appears to them to us that they're doing it for fun to crush the skulls of the infant chimpanzees and then run back to their own mountain. This is apparently a thing that happens from time to time. So my question to my colleagues in upper campus is do we now need a penitentiary for the chimpanzees who are going to commit crimes if they are people, if they are persons?
Dear, dear, dear, dear. Festus said to Paul in Acts 26, I think all of your learning has made you nutty. Oh no, Paul is not nutty. You guys are nutty.
You have way too much book knowledge and too little common sense. We are different. We are accountable. We have, secondly, the fact that we are dependent.
There's a lot of discussion about dependence and that maybe we should all be very independent and maybe even in our marriages we have to avoid being co-dependent, emotionally co-dependent and let's be as independent as possible in this Canadian society. But dependence has a place and there's actually only one person that we need to depend on. He is the only reliable person who will be 100% reliable and honest and true in your life and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. I'm sure but those of you who are married, you love and respect your spouse.
But the only ultimately reliable person in your life will be the Lord Jesus Christ. There is an appropriateness to that dependence. It's interesting that when man was given that breath of life and put in that garden and given an unfall and intellect, that's when God said, manage the earth. I give you a job to manage the creatures and this garden and this place to a man with an unfall and mind.
Did he take that back? No, he did not. After man sinned and now has a fallen mind. He still has to figure out how to be astured of what he has been given on this planet.
How do you think he's doing? I would say that he's doing very badly in his management of this place that he has been given with his fallen mind but the place is still the place and it too is fallen. Therefore, we need to be dependent on God and we can worship God. As a person with an office with students, you get into especially with large classes, the one that went out with 130, you get into the frame of mind of who is coming.
I see him coming down the hall. Brace yourself. I know who that is. This is going to take grace to deal with this person.
Then there are others that you go, oh good, good. I'm going to stop what I'm doing right now and I'm going to turn my chair and look at this. How are you doing? I'm glad to see you.
There are people that you really like. One of them is from West Africa and he's about six foot five and he's got a 500-watt smile and a deep voice and he just graduated while he's missing one course, fifth in the class. Fifth in the class. Very pleasant man to deal with and has a certain that passion that you like to see that this is actually not about getting a piece of paper called a B-Eng diploma.
It's about the science is interesting. The science of this is interesting. This individual whom I've come to love, he comes and we're talking about the fact that he's finished all but one exam and I don't know how it happened again. But we got on to the subject of faith and I said because the Chinese Bible study from three days ago had looked at John chapter four and I said, well, Usman, of course the two components, the necessary components are that we must worship in spirit and in truth and he sat up straight and he said, that's what I need.
That's what I want. Now I have time. I'm not overwhelmed with my engineering studies. Now I'll have time to look at these things and I'm still in contact with him by email.
I trust that I'll be able to continue to talk to him about what Jesus meant in John chapter four. But that kind of relationship with God is part of what it means to understand that you created in the image of God have been given the possibility of worshiping God in spirit and in truth. The woman at the well, it wasn't there yet. She needed to be there but she wasn't there.
And if we have spirit and truth, then the meaningfulness of worship and of relationship becomes possible. This is quite interesting that it says that we are created in the image of God and that my time is running out. It says then in Psalm 8, he made us a little lower than the angels. Have you ever wondered at human capability that the talk, how much better can an angel sing than the top opera singer in the world?
One of the guys in the class that I just finished, he just won the Canadian, I guess they call it 60 meter dash. He's 22 years old and he's the fastest guy in Canada based on the recent competition. I guess an angel could run a lot faster than that. But when I read this verse in Psalm and I think about all the capabilities that human beings have to do mathematics, to sing and to do sports and these things, I think that these are according to my understanding of scripture, part of what it means to be created as a human being in the image of God.
Now what does society and what does the world do with these gifts? They say look at my gold medal. I just run a hundred meters or 60 meters or 100 yards. I am the greatest.
Remember who used to say that? I am the greatest. He would love to say that over and over. They use it for their own self-aggrandizement or they use it to make enormous sums of money that as far as I know stay in their bank accounts largely speaking.
They use all of these gifts that God has given, not to glorify God, but to glorify themselves. We have a conscience which I spoke about a few minutes ago. We have our own moral sense. And thirdly, we are of great value.
The history of Western thought diverged in the 1800s after a man called Hegel. Some of it went off in the Kierkegaard direction. Some went off in the Nietzsche direction. Who did Nietzsche influence the man who said famously, God is dead, Hitler.
These are big divergences in thinking. But according to the materialistic communist, and that is the as a rose, partly out of fear of communism, the materialistic view does not allow us to attribute much value to us if we are purely material. How is it that we should put such great value on the human being? It is the Bible that puts great value on the human being, unlike communism, unlike pragmatism.
That means that for the Christian, respect for others is automatic. It's automatic. In closing, I'm therefore going to just make three points, equipment, attitude, and efforts. I would say that on a very, very basic issue, the issue of personhood and of the value of the human being, we have the best arguments going.
We have the best case going to know that the human being is of great value. The apologetic aspect, the second, our attitude. I dare say you are going to run into a few human beings this week. Some of them will come toward you and you will go better brace myself.
Some of them will come toward you and you'll have a big smile on your face because you're very, very comfortable with that loving and caring individual whom you know. It doesn't matter. Our attitude should be you are created in the image of God. I am compelled to respect you.
I am compelled to honor the sanctity of what you are and what God has made you. That should be our attitude, regardless of who we run into. Thirdly, our efforts and our use of time. One of the songs of 20 years ago, we aren't here for a long time.
We're here for a good time. That is an antithetical idea to the Christian. We need to make use of the limited amount of time that we are here. We need to be careful how we interact with other people.
We need to capitalize, as it were, on our interactions with other people. I'm struck by this passage from Jeremiah. But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the House of Israel after those days. Sayeth the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts and write it on their hearts and will be their God and they shall be my people.
And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor and every man his brother saying, No, the Lord, for they shall all know me from the least of them unto the greatest. Sayeth the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sins no more. Now I know that this is speaking of a future day. But I believe that it applies equally well to the common need.
Here we have the prophet Jeremiah and he is giving a recognition here to human beings created in the image of God. In that society, you might say there was some who are the least and you have some that are the greatest. Jeremiah says, I know, I know, and you have one common need. You need to be changed on the inside and you need your sins to be forgiven.
And that is our birthright. That is what happens when you are born again. You come to know that your sins are forgiven by the blood and sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. I trust that with these few thoughts this morning, the Lord will empower you and give you some, maybe some, read passages like Psalm 139 talking about fearfully and wonderfully made.
David writes there that God knows the words before they come off my tongue. He knows my intentions. He knows where I am. He knows what I'm doing.
You could read that passage as you go through your week, keeping in mind that the people all around you in a very, very important respect are the same as you created in the image of God. Shall we pray? Father, we thank you that your word is clear and that we can enjoy its truth and receive its instruction. Help us Lord to be humble as we deal with others.
We pray that if there is anyone here who doesn't know what it means to look upon the Christ, the one who was lifted up and thus receive forgiveness of sins that that person would indeed look to Christ for the redemption that can come to the very soul and redeem that person and make that person your own. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you.
Thank you.