What do Anabaptists Value? Does it Matter? (Part 1 of 4)

Well, good evening to you all. It is a delight to be surrounded by people who sing their faith as enthusiastically as you have this evening. Cynthia and I had a beautiful drive down this afternoon, and the drive was from Northwest Pennsylvania, Faith Builders area.

And we do bring you greetings in Christ from the brothers and sisters there. Maybe to settle my nerves just a little bit, I'll offer a few more introductory comments. I was born into an old Mennonite family. I'm the baby on this particular picture.

Dad was a minister in Southeastern Mennonite Conference before we—well, even after we moved to South Carolina when I was about seven years old. Mother—my mom was in a large family of Heatwalls, and some of you may have read the story of her mother, Vera.

And if you have read that story, my mom was the one who gave grandmother the mumps in which she lost her hearing. I don't believe—I was thinking about if I have any family connections in this area over the years, and I don't think I have any direct ones necessarily. But I do know that my fifth great-grandfather, David Heatwall, in the late 1700s lived for just a couple of years in the Chambersburg area, and then he moved from here to Harrisonburg, Virginia, which is where I was born. But we did—my dad and mom were asked to move to South Carolina when I was seven, and I was enrolled in the local public school. This is my fifth grade class, and I don't know if you can pick me out or not, but I'm right over here on the right.

And as you can see, I was a minority there at Denmark Oler Elementary School.

A few other snapshots: growing up, Sitting Bull, and Thomas Edison were two of the people that I just couldn't get finished reading about.

Cynthia and I have five children, and we really need to update this picture because I only see—well, all of our children are married, and not all of the spouses are on this picture. And we now have 11 grandchildren.

So yes, a bit out of date.

We have been at Faith Builders for the last 23 years. We moved there from South Carolina. And as Brandon was saying, it is from a course that I taught called Anabaptism as Worldview that I pulled the material for this weekend.

Now, does everyone have a handout that would like a handout? If you need a handout, you can raise your hand, and I think we can get one to you. Everyone? I think I may, from time to time, explain where I'm at in the handout, but it hopefully will be self-explanatory. So that's a few things about me. And now I'd like to hear a few things about you.

Can you tell me what are some things that you did in the last 24 hours?

Travel. Travel. You traveled. Okay. We have traveling. I'll try not to ask you to go into detail, although I'm interested in knowing where you traveled from and to, but I'll stop there. What else did you do? I counted Amish. You what? I counted Amish. Counted Amish. You can always rely on Edsel to give you an interesting contribution to a list like this. It counted Amish. Thank you. Anyone top that? What did you do in the last 24 hours?

Ate. You ate. Did I hear that right? Yes.

Fixed a refrigerator. We fixed a refrigerator. Copy edited medical journals. I missed that one. Copy edited medical journals. I'm going to say CE Medical Journals. We're going to stop there and just observe that what we have here is an answer to the question, what? And we've all done things in the last 24 hours. Our lives are filled with activities. Our lives are filled with things that we do. Now, we're going to take one of these. I think we'll take the eight since I suspect that's fairly universal. Did everyone eat in this group in the last 24 hours? Did anyone not eat? Maybe there's some fasting going on here. So a question.

I'm thinking of a sit-down meal. How many of you had at least one—only had one sit-down meal in the last 24 hours? Can I see your hand? Only one sit-down meal. Okay. How many had two in the last 24 hours?

Okay. How many had three in the last 24 hours?

I think that I'm going to say I think the average was two. Okay. How many of you, when you had your sit-down meal—I'm going to assume that you were doing this with other people—how many of you passed the stuff? Well, maybe I should ask if you passed, or did you have a common bowl that I don't think that—how many of you passed clockwise? There's going to be two options: clockwise or counterclockwise. How many of you passed clockwise? Could I see your hands?

How many of you passed counterclockwise?

How many of you didn't pass?

There were two of you. Okay. So it was kind of both.

And I lost track there. I think clockwise was the—how many of you prayed after you ate your meal? Any hands? How many of you prayed before you had the meal? How many of you prayed both times, before and after?

The majority here was before. Now, what we were doing there was just taking a little bit of time to think about the how we do what we do.

But of course, underneath both what we do and how we do what we do is the why.

The why. Why is it that we pass clockwise rather than counterclockwise? Why do we pray at all before meals or after meals or both times? And this why, we could say, is a set of beliefs and values that form that underlying motivation for our behaviors, not only what we do but how we do what we do. And that's what we're going to be talking about this weekend. When we talk about worldview, that's what we mean.

Now, in Romans 12, Paul talks about this realm, and he says, "I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies." And it's in our bodies that we work. It's in our bodies that we live. It's in our bodies that we engage in this set of activities.

"To present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship." Paul is calling for us to behave, to live in certain ways, to have a set of behaviors, a set of what and how that align with something, that align, he says, in ways that are acceptable to God.

And so he's speaking in this realm of the what and the how. But he goes on, and he says, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." And so in verse one, he's talking about this realm, but now he's talking about this realm. And he's saying that there's two primary whys that can motivate your life. And the one why, he says, is this world, or it's the spirit of this age. That's a set of answers, a set of beliefs and values that can produce a kind of behavior. He said that's the one why.

There's another why, a transform-mind why. And he says that's the one that is to be growing up in you and producing the kind of behavior that God is delighted with. So another name for this why, this set of beliefs and values, is worldview. And I'd like to define that word for us this evening. And I'm going to do it, first of all, by giving two figures of speech.

We could say that a worldview is like glasses. That is, it's the way I understand the world, the way I understand the world, which is like glasses. You see, as we go through life, we're constantly experiencing different things. And it's if you have glasses, this is the way that you experience.

And the glasses help you to understand, to see, to interpret what is going on. And that's what a worldview is like. It's like a set of glasses through which we see and evaluate and analyze the experiences we have in life.

I want us to listen to the words of a novelist, H.G. Wells. He said, "There was a time when my little soul shone and was uplifted at the starry enigma of the sky." And I'm going to stop there.

So this writer says, "There was a time when I'd go outside and I'd look up, and I would see the Milky Way, and I would see all the stars." And he says, "Something inside of me would just well up. My little soul would shine."

Now, notice what he's doing is he's looking at something. That's the what. And the experience he was having was an experience of worship, an experience of wonder. He goes on. "Now, as an adult, I go out and I look at the stars as I look at wallpaper."

He's doing the same thing. The what is the same. He's looking at the stars. But notice how the experience is so completely different. In the one case, he looks at the stars and he's going, "He's breathless." In the other case, he looks at the stars and says, "Ah, wallpaper."

Something has shifted in the set of beliefs and values through which he understands that experience.

That's what we mean by worldview. So it's the way we understand the world or make sense of it. So it's like glasses. A second analogy is we could say that a worldview is the way that I define normal.

It's the way that I define normal. And so in that sense, it's like a carpenter's level, like a level.

Now, we use levels in order to make judgments. Is that line—is it level or not? That's what that tool is for. Our worldview is the same kind of thing. Worldview is something we have. And as we go through life, as we experience things, we pull out that level and we're evaluating. Are these people normal or not?

And I'm basing it on what I have in my worldview. And I'm using that to decide if you are level or on the level or not. Let me give an illustration of this. I suspect all of us have taken multiple choice tests somewhere along the line, maybe in your schoolwork or getting a driver's license. We have to take a multiple choice test. So you ask a question, it gives you four or five answers. You pick the best one and hopefully get it right.

Randy Richards, who was a missionary in a different culture, did a lot of teaching in a culture quite different than Western culture.

And he said he gave multiple choice tests, but he found something really fascinating in this other culture. And that is that they left quite a few questions blank. They didn't answer them all.

Now, when you take a multiple choice test, what do you do? You answer them all, right? If you don't know it, you guess. In this culture where he was teaching, he asked me, he said, "Why don't you answer all the questions?"

And he said, "Oh, well, Mr. Richards, we don't answer them if we don't know the answer." And he said, "Well, why not? Why don't you just guess?" And he said, "Oh, if we guessed, we might accidentally get one right that we really didn't know. And that would give you the wrong impression.

It would be a form of lying."

You see how their worldview was a level to evaluate a situation like that. And it's a bit different, perhaps, than ours.

So worldview is the way we understand the world, the way we make sense out of it. It's the way we evaluate the world. Now, let me give a little more rigorous definition.

We could say that a worldview is the set of

head and heart commitments.

What do I mean?

A head commitment is a commitment that has to do with what I believe about the world.

A heart commitment is what I love or value.

See, we have thousands of commitments, things that we think are true about the way the world really is, and things that we think about how the world ought to be. And so let's add that to our definition.

We could say the way the world really is.

Those are head commitments. One of the things I believe about the way the world is is that I can't just push through this wall. I can't walk through—I think we live in a world where you just can't walk through walls. That's a head commitment.

And we have thousands of these. We also have heart commitments, things we are sure that the world ought to be this particular way. These are things we love. These are things we value. So we could say it's the way the world ought to be. It's the way the world works when it's working the way it's supposed to work.

Head commitments, heart commitments. When I was in fourth grade, remember I was in public school. And during the first week, probably the first day of class, Mrs. Sears, our homeroom teacher, came to us and she said, "There's going to be times when I have to be out of the classroom.

And so you're going to be in here. And when I'm out of the classroom, you need to just keep working. Don't be talking. Don't be cutting up. Just keep working." Now, she said, "I'm going to return. You won't know when I'm coming back, but I'm going to come back. And if I come back and I hear somebody in here talking, the whole class gets a licking." Now, by licking, what she meant, she had this rubber strap about this long. And we would all stand by our desks and we'd put our hands out. And she can come by and give three licks on each hand.

Now, we found out that the reason she had to be going from the classroom every day, several times a day, is because she had an addiction to tobacco. And so she would go smoke.

But it was more than once that she would come back and somebody was talking. And so we got our lickings. And on one particular day, she told us to all stand and put our hands out. And I was feeling the injustice of it all. So when she gets to me, I said, "Mrs. Sears, this isn't fair."

And she stops. And she says, "What do you mean?" I said, "Mrs. Sears, this isn't fair. I wasn't talking. I was behaving myself. I was doing what you said to do. And I have to get a licking." And she says, "Boy, I'm going to tell you something.

And the sooner you learn what it is I have to tell you, the better off your life's going to be." I said, "In this world, the good have to suffer with the bad." Now, notice Mrs. Sears, part of her worldview was a head commitment that says the way this world is is that the good and the bad suffer together. And that particular belief, that particular head commitment led to a behavior that said, "I'm going to punish the whole class for one person's indiscretion."

It was worldview translating into behavior. Now, I had a worldview too. And my worldview, you see, I had a heart commitment. I had a commitment that said, "If I wasn't misbehaving, I shouldn't get punished." That's the way the world ought to be.

And I was acting out of that. That fueled my behavior and complaining a bit and asking for an exception.

I'm going to suggest that all of life is lived out of everything that we do. Underneath it is a set of beliefs and values that shapes—maybe we could even say determines—what we do and how we do what we do.

And it's that set of beliefs and values that we call our worldview. So let's wrap up our definition by adding—so it's the set of head commitments and heart commitments, what I believe, what I love and value about the way the world really is and the way that it ought to be that shapes—and I better get the same words that I have in your handout—that shapes what I do and how I do it.

That's the definition that I'm using here this evening. Now, let me try to illustrate this just a little further.

I find that by using illustrations from other worldviews, it makes some of this more clearly. So I'll tell you about some of the travel groups in Turkey. I understand when they want to compliment a newborn, maybe they're walking down the street and in their local town and their friends are coming the other direction, pushing the stroller, and in the stroller is their infant child. And they want to—oh, how you want to do—oh, isn't it cute or whatever. If they want to compliment the baby, they will say, "Oh, your baby looks like a donkey."

And no, it's not because they have particularly special warm feelings about donkeys in that country. It's really seen as a negative thing. You really don't want your child to look like a donkey. So when they say, "Oh, your baby looks like a donkey," the reason that they say that—notice what are they doing? They're complimenting the baby.

How are they doing it? By saying it looks like a donkey. What's the worldview underneath it? The worldview underneath it is they're convinced that the atmosphere is filled with malevolent spirits, spirits that are looking out for humans and saying, "Oh, do we see any smiles anywhere? Anybody having too good of a time? And if they are, let's go after them. Let's kind of play a prank, do something negative there." So you don't want to make a target out of this newborn or the newborn's parents. So you have to distract the spirits. And so you say, "Oh, your baby looks like a donkey." The spirits are listening. And they say, "Oh, poor kid.

Enough trouble without us messing with them." But your friends know the code. The code is that they really think your child looks great. Okay? Now, see, we can see the connection between worldview and the how and what so well in that. But I think everything you and I do is just as intimately connected. But it's hard for us to make those connections.

I have found that I found it helpful to use a tree as a way of thinking about worldview. And so if the crown of the tree is our way of life, this is, we could say, the what and the how of our lives.

The way of life. If that's the crown, what it is that produces that crown is our—the why is our worldview. But where are we going to put that? Are we going to put that down here? We could. But I'm going to suggest that we should put it here as the trunk. And I'll explain why in a moment. So the trunk is the set of beliefs and values or what we've been calling worldview.

And this is what produces the particular way of life.

And by this set of beliefs and values, I'd like to unpack that a little more for right now, although that's not really the purpose. If we were doing a weekend series on worldview, what we'd probably do is stop right here and then unpack some of the core beliefs and values out of which all of our way of life flows. But that's not the point here. But what I would like to do is just take a few moments and give some of these core fundamental beliefs and values that all of us have. I've already said there's thousands of these. But of the thousands, they kind of distill down to a couple really big ones.

And so this is nothing really new. But the question of, is there a God? And what is God like? The way we answer those two questions shapes so much of our life. Related to that is the question, what is real? You and I give radically different answers to the question of what is real than what most people in our world today do.

That's at the heart of our set of beliefs and values. How do we know what is true? Again, all of us have answers to these questions. Even if we can't say what those answers are, we're living out those answers.

What kind of thing

is a human? What kind of thing are you? What kind of thing am I?

It's one of these fundamental questions. What is good? What is really, really good?

So just a few of the fundamental questions that make up that set of beliefs and values out of which we live all of our lives.

But we're going to move underneath that for a moment because I want to think with us about what is it that gives us the particular set of beliefs and values that we have? Why do you have the ones that you have and not others?

And so I want to identify four nutrients, four influences, four factors that shape our set of beliefs and values. The first one, texts and songs. I'm going to give you four sets of two. And notice these kind of belong together, texts and songs.

What do I mean? And by the way, I'm not talking about what you do on a phone when I say text here. I'm saying by text. I'm defining that as statements

that I trust, statements that we trust. See, there are certain—it might be in a book. It may be just sayings that you have. But there are these statements that you say you can bank on that. For Christians, the scriptures are a text that you say that's trustworthy.

For some Americans, the constitution is a trustworthy text. My grandmother, I think she lived most of her life by a set of sayings and texts. She had at least one for about every situation. You don't have to, if you want to, a place for everything and everything in its place and so on. She had these—and these things you could rest were a good guide for how to live your life, texts.

And then when we take a text that we're convinced is true, God is good, for example, that would be a text. You say when you put that into a song, it gives it even more influencing power in shaping what you come to believe as true. I suspect that the song, "Jesus Loves Me," is one of the primary ways that you and I came to accept the premise that God really does know you and care about you. "Jesus Loves Me," that's a text. And you heard people that were convinced that was true say that over and over again and sing that. And with time, that begins to shape what you consider to be true as well.

A second factor that shapes our set of beliefs and values—and I don't know if the order that I necessarily want to do these, but we'll take this one next—stories and the corresponding entity or heroes, stories and heroes.

And I'm defining this as narratives that capture the imagination.

You tell me the stories that your parents told, retold, and told with passion and energy. And I will tell you something about what you believe and value because it's those stories that have incredible shaping power in our lives. So we could ask, what are the stories?

Let's just take something like the Revolutionary War. Is it the story of Washington and his bedraggled troops surviving the winter and then storming the Hessians and conquering? Is that the story that really captures your imagination? Or is it the story of Peter Miller of Ephratah, who walked 70 miles to plead for the life of Michael Whitman, who had been condemned to death for spying? And Washington was part of that process. And he asks—or Peter Whitman walks these miles and asks, "Can you let him go?" And Washington says, "What he's done is just too bad. I can't do that."

And I said, "I'm sorry, but I can't let your friend off." And Peter—excuse me—Peter Miller says, "Oh, Michael Whitman is not my friend. He's the bitterest enemy that I have." And Washington said, "If that's the case or since that's the case, that changes the way I would see this, I'll grant your enemy a pardon." Now, there's a story that happens in the same time period. Which one captures your imagination?

Which one do we tell in such a way that our children's imaginations are captured? I remember talking with a man who he was just expressing to me how disappointed he was that one of his sons had joined the armed forces.

And then within the next hour of our conversation, he mentions how that one of the things that he and his sons loved to do was read together the stories of Green Berets and other military heroes. If those stories capture my imagination, they're going to capture the imagination of my children.

And that's going to form what it is they believe is true about the world and what is important to do in the world.

The stories that I tell my children and get excited about and recommend likely shape what they value more than any sermons that I give.

A fourth category that shapes our beliefs and values—and this is one that we don't think about a whole lot, perhaps—but it's symbols and images, symbols and images. And I'm defining this as values distilled into pictures.

If we don't understand the power of symbols, our society clearly does.

Someone has said that a picture is worth a thousand words. And one of the reasons is because a picture that has become a symbol—we could say that a symbol is worth a thousand pictures—because a symbol is a picture that, with time, has accumulated a whole set of memories, a whole set of meanings, a whole set of sensory inputs. Let me just give an example for those of you who would attend here.

For those of you who attend here, this is more than just a towel and a basin. This is a symbol of something. And just looking at it, you have a set of memories. You might even have stories that this evokes.

Symbols capture without words. They capture value.

And if this was a Jewish audience, that symbol would evoke a tremendous amount of emotional reaction. See, there's something about symbols, whether it's a symbol like that or whether it's a ball team symbol or whether it's the Starbucks logo.

You see them, and there's often responses that your body and your mind make that are beyond your thinking.

They're an automatic reaction. What I find with particularly the younger generation today who loves cafés and coffee, that some symbols of that kind, there's a physical reaction to that. You feel different when you see those kinds of things. This is the way we're wired.

And as followers of Jesus, we need to be paying attention to what are the symbols that capture the beliefs and values of our faith.

And of course, the cross is one of those. By the way, here's another one that I think is maybe one of our symbols as a people. And if you think of some that you'd like to talk about, I'd love to hear them. But here's one of our symbols as conservative Anabaptist people: the extended dining room table is one of our symbols. It speaks of hospitality. It speaks of brotherhood. It speaks of the value we place on family and extended family, distilled values into symbols. And then a fourth way that our worldview is shaped.

And in some ways, out of all of these, I think this fourth one is maybe the most powerful: practices and rituals.

What do I mean by this? Regular

and repeated activities that embody value, that put value into flesh, into something to do. For example, the simple practice of eating a meal together as a family. It's a regular, repeated activity. Maybe it's something you do every evening or maybe several times a day. But in our settings, often the mother would take care to make maybe an attractive and enjoyable meal.

Everyone stops what they're doing. They stop their activity.

And they come together. They pause and once again recognize God as the giver of all good gifts. And then there's relaxed conversation. There's discussion about the news, maybe talk about the food that you're enjoying together, the events of the day. You take your time. You're together. You do that day after day after day.

That practice produces a whole set of values that you could preach all day long and never actually produce. But values like loyalty and love for family, a realization that money is not the greatest good in making money, it's not the greatest good, the value of rest, of nourishment, of feeding the body and soul, the value of remembering God as the giver of all. All of that is just with time, those values become embedded in the people that practice them.

I'm impressed with the emphasis that boys' camps put on practices. And one of the things we could talk about a number of practices that they really emphasize, but we'll just take one. And that is, first thing in the morning, when a boy gets up, you make your bed and you make it carefully and you make it well. And when I talk to the personnel of the camps, they say, "Oh, this is significant. But just doing this," it begins to teach them the value, the joy that comes in doing something productive and doing it really well. They start the day off by doing something neatly, caring about it. And they say that gives them a framework for which they can live the rest of their day.

And it's not that it always works out that way for the rest of the day, but day after day, that same practice begins to give a framework in which good things can develop. I grew up in Harrisonburg. Our family moved to South Carolina when I was between first and second grade.

I cried the first day of school and the next day and the next day and the next day, but that's a story for another time.

One of the things that my older brother and sister told me before I went to school there at the public school, they said, "Every morning, they have a practice. And that is the practice of pledging allegiance to the flag."

And they said, "Steven, our family, we're followers of Jesus. And so we don't pledge allegiance to the flag." Now, I don't know why they told me and my parents didn't, but they set me down and let me know the way things were. They said, "Our worldview does not let us do the pledging allegiance." So they said, "What you can do, you can stand. It's appropriate to be respectful." And they said, "Just stand. And yeah, face the flag. I mean, that's not a big deal, but don't pledge to the flag. You pledge to Jesus, not to the flag."

And then they said, "After the pledge is said, then you'll sing a song, My Country 'Tis of Thee." They say it's a fine song. You can sing it. And so that's what I did. That's what I grew up doing. I'd just stand with everybody, and I'd look at the flag while everybody around me was saying, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible for liberty and justice for all." So now I did learn the text.

Notice what's going on there. There's that text, "I pledge allegiance to the flag." There is story because that whole practice, day after day after day after day, sometimes the teacher would tell us stories to go along with it about how at Fort McHenry, you had the poet that was watching through the cannon hole, and he was trying to see, "Is the flag still there?" And then we'd sometimes sing the national anthem.

So the stories were brought into it. So we had the practice every morning, pledging allegiance. We had the stories associated with it. We had the song, My Country 'Tis of Thee, and bringing in kind of this religious aura to this country allegiance. And of course, we had the flag.

And that practice, I think that is one of the reasons why people grow up to see serving in the military as one of the most significant things you could do with your life. That belief and value doesn't just come out of nowhere.

It is formed in us. It is nurtured in us. And these are four of the ways in which beliefs and values are formed in us. Now, there is another one that's really more significant probably than any of these. And that is, we'll just say people. The people that we have close emotional connections to, those are the ones, through their stories, through their songs, through their texts, and so on, that shape the beliefs and values that we have.

Now, a wise home, a wise church will take initiative in shaping the way of life, the beliefs and values, the underlying stories, practices, texts, and symbols that are shaping each other.

In our next session, we will talk about tsunamis.

Each evening, I plan to offer one science lesson. And these are intended to illustrate some aspect of what I'm talking about in the main sessions. However, I may not always make that connection clear. Sometimes I may. Sometimes I may not. This evening, what I'd like to do is decompose hydrogen peroxide. And hydrogen peroxide is something that most of us probably have in our medicine cabinets.

And if we write it in notation, it's H2O2. Now, you're probably aware that water is H2O. And when you have two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen, it forms a very stable arrangement. But when you add another oxygen to this, this oxygen is only lightly attached or bonded to this molecule. And so it's very easy for this one to be removed and spun off.

And that's why hydrogen peroxide, we like it for putting on wounds and so on, is that that extra oxygen will bind with what's infecting us and change it into something else. And now, if you let your hydrogen peroxide, if you let it in your medicine cabinet with the lid off, it rapidly becomes water.

I say rapidly over the course of weeks. Even if you don't have the lid off over the course of years, you just have water sitting in your cabinet. And so we can describe that decomposition this way. The H2O2 becomes, with time, water. And it spins off this oxygen molecule.

Now, those of you who've had chemistry know that's not a balanced equation, but we're not going to try to balance it here. But that is what happens. Now, since this takes so long and it turns from one colorless substance to another colorless substance, it's not a really interesting thing. It's not something we could do here this evening and say, "Oh, that was pretty neat." However, if we sped this process up, it would be a bit more interesting. And if we added some color to the water, that would help. So what we're going to try to do is to speed this process up by using a catalyst. And that is a word that describes a material that speeds up a chemical reaction without being affected by the reaction.

So I have here a little bit of hydrogen peroxide, although I will need to tell you this is not the kind that you would find in your medicine cabinet. I think that's 3%. This is about 30%. Now, that's assuming that it's not too old. And so I'm not sure how old this is. Maybe it is down to 3%. We'll find out in a moment.

And I said we want to make it a little more interesting. So we're going to put some food coloring in here so that we can see it.

So what we're going to try to do is drive this oxygen off. And we're going to try to drive it off a little more rapidly than over a couple of weeks. And we're going to try to even at this point, if we drove it off, you'd probably see maybe some steam in the air. What we're going to try to do is capture that in soap. So just have some laundry detergent here. And we will put some of that in and see if this release of oxygen can cause it to suds up a little bit.

I will admit a bit of nervousness about this particular reaction because it generally behaves itself.

But there's two things that can go wrong. One is that the hydrogen peroxide can have already decomposed. And then it's kind of a problem. The other is that if I get a little more quantity than I intend, it can create a bit more of a spectacle than I intend, particularly with a carpeted floor. Now, the catalyst that I'm using here is potassium iodide. And there's a variety of catalysts that you can use. We could just use common yeast. That would do it.

So what I'm going to do here is add this potassium iodide, just add it to that, and we'll see if it does decompose here.

Okay. That behaved itself rather nicely. So I'm grateful.

In 2004, the day after Christmas off the west coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, there was an earthquake. Many of you probably remember that, not quite 20 years ago. The earthquake measured a 9.1 on the Richter scale.

That earthquake triggered a series of devastating tsunamis that bordered the Indian Ocean. And we know that in a tsunami, there is a significant displacement of water in the deep ocean. This causes a rapidly moving wave. But as this energy reaches shallower areas of the ocean, the speed decreases, but the height of the water increases a lot.

And in 2004, the earthquake surge was over 100 feet high at places. I think in Hurricane Ian, what did they say? I heard that some of the storm surge was 10 feet or so. Can you imagine one that was 100 feet?

Just absolutely tremendous power wiping everything in its path away. In fact, one of the memorials to that tsunami was the Apung One, a 2,600-ton ship, which was just picked up and flung over a mile inland by this tsunami and dropped it there. And now it's still there because they really don't have any way to get an object like that back out to the ocean. So it's a tourist attraction, but in a much more sober way. Over 230,000 people were killed in that tsunami.

Now, I want us to return to our passage in Romans because I believe that there's a tsunami here.

Look for it. "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God."

There is a worldview that aligns with what is true. It's described here as good, acceptable, and perfect. There is a way of understanding reality that is that. But there is also a worldview that Paul is talking about here. And he describes it as the pattern of the world. It's the spirit of the age. And it is a deadly worldview.

But he's saying that this worldview is trying to overwhelm us, to press us into its shape, to insert its ideas about what is true and good into our hearts and minds. It is a worldview that is at odds with the way things really are.

It's a way of seeing reality, however, that makes sense to most people today.

It's in the air we breathe. It seems obvious. It's the pattern of this world. But it's wrong. And it's deadly. It was this way in Paul's time. And so this is nothing new. But this is the tsunami that I see here, a spiritual tsunami that threatens to overwhelm us, whether like the tsunami that we talked about there in Indonesia or whether this kind of tsunami.

It's a tsunami that is working to substitute its songs and heroes and rituals into our lives to erase the ones that we've been given and to insert those pictures, those images, those stories, those values, those beliefs of the dominant perspective.

We're being bombarded, overwhelmed, we could say tsunamied, with a constant barrage of texts and symbols and stories and heroes and images that nurture a worldview that's at odds with the worldview of Jesus.

And for some of our church communities and some of our homes, we've lost control of these elements that shape a worldview. The heroes of this age are often more colorful and attractive than the heroes of Christianity. The stories, the movies of this age are capturing the imaginations of a generation.

Bible stories and the stories of godly men and women can easily fade into significance. The texts of this age, the podcasts, the websites, the talk radio sometimes produce more excitement than those texts of the church. The symbols of this age evoke more emotion than those of Christianity.

And it seems that at least in some of our communities, we are drinking from so many different wells. We're pulling from so many different sources that it's no wonder that we see the world so differently, even from our brothers and sisters in our church. And because these roots, these formative factors of our worldview are getting tsunamied, overwhelmed, that eventually replaces what it is we value and believe.

Paul instructs us, "Don't be conformed. Don't allow your worldview to take the shape of the dominant culture around you. Don't let your beliefs and values be pressed on you by what's in the air." That is the default. That's what will happen if we don't bring some kind of power that can withstand a tsunami. And so that might be the question.

I see I was not keeping up here.

The pattern of this world has beliefs and values and stories and songs and symbols and practices. And they can overwhelm the beliefs and values that maybe we grew up with or that we have as followers of Jesus. And I'm going to just walk through that quickly. "Do not be conformed to the worldview of this age," says Paul.

"Do not let your beliefs and values be pressed on you by the dominant culture." But my question would be, where is there sufficient power to withstand this tsunami? See, I think you and I as individuals are sitting ducks when it comes to the strength of the spirit of the age.

We continue reading with Paul, but this time in his letter to the Ephesians. And he says, "Therefore, I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened." And we'll stop there for a moment and just notice some of the language here: wisdom, knowledge, understanding. Paul is asking God in this prayer. He's saying, "God, I want You to give Your people an accurate worldview, an accurate set of beliefs and values."

That's part of this wisdom and understanding, eyes opened. And he goes on. Actually, I didn't finish this, did I? "That you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe."

Specifically, Paul says there's a couple of things that Christian people need to have in their worldview. And the one is back here, what is the hope of His calling? God's calling, Paul is saying, is a reason to hope. That needs to be in our worldview. That needs to be in our set of beliefs and values. It also needs the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.

Paul says we need to have it in our set of beliefs and values that the future with God is glorious. And a third thing that needs to be in our worldview is that the power of God is available now.

And it's available in regards to the spirit of the age and this tsunami that threatens to overwhelm us. And if we want a picture of this power, he says, "Look at Jesus. According to the working of His mighty power, which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him in His right hand in the heavenly places far above all principality and power and might and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come. And He put all things under His feet." Stop. God's power took this person who hung dead on a cross.