It’s my delight to be here to speak to you. I’ve attended former Prayer Breakfasts and so I understand something of the pace that s been set. I stand here having heard the introduction, something about youth and expertise about youth. I, as you might guess, speak at a number of breakfasts and dinners around the country, farther away from home. In fact, there I’m thought of as somewhat of an expert. Someone said an expert is someone over 200 miles from home, and so I qualify. In fact. I think I’ve been responsible for the death of more chickens than anybody my age in the entire world.

However, to address you here in DuPage County is a particular thrill to me, but it also presents, as you can suspect certain apprehensions. In fact, over the months since I was invited I have gone over various ideas and changed my mind numbers of times. Which reminds me of a story. It’s a story about two microbes who were swimming along the bloodstream of a horse, and as they’re discussing their plight, one microbe turns to the other and says. -I’m getting tired of living life in this vein.” And so he moves over to another vein at the precise moment that a veterinarian gives the horse a shot of penicillin. The plot thickens at this point.

The penicillin runs directly down the vein, killing the little discontented microbe. The moral of the story being: Don’t change streams in the middle of a horse.

And so I have decided to stick with my original inclination, even though over the last months I’ve had various other kinds of thoughts. I asked this morning that we read Scripture from Romans the 12th chapter, the delightfully practical and applicable chapter that talks about our responsibility as individuals, personal things that we can do as opposed to those large issues that we often think about.

I, with you, struggle with how I go about presenting my body as a living sacrifice. What is the place of the responsible citizen, the Christian citizen, in the world? There are times when I feel very unimportant and feel like my part doesn’t matter much. If one allows these feelings to grow, one can become unconcerned and careless. So I struggle with you against those kinds of things.

I received a tremendous amount of help along this line from a book that is probably familiar to you. Solzhenitsyn has become a commonplace word in our vocabulary. He’s written numbers of popular books including Cancer Ward and Full Circle. Perhaps his best known work is a book with a long, strange title, The Gulag Archipelago.

In this book, Solzhenitsyn talks about life in Russia. He tells us that, over the course of the years since the turn of the century, hundreds of thousands, in fact, millions of people have been incarcerated in prisons in Russia. In fact, he says, unless you’ve served what they call a fiver or a tener (that is, five years or ten years in prison) you don’t really have enough credentials to speak out in society because you don’t know what you’re talking about. But. he says, what’s happened is that inadvertently and systematically the system in Russia has imprisoned millions of people until today there is a group of people walking about the streets of Russia who are a population within the population. If you take a tour to Moscow you won’t see these people with bumper stickers on their cars or badges on their lapels or anything like that. But he says that you must be aware of the fact that systematically a group of people have been taught for almost a century now that the system doesn’t work

Solzhenitsyn has said some things that I find a little unpalatable about our western culture and especially about the flabbiness of America. But he does speak about the strength of what he believes God is doing in Russia, and he says that he believes that there is a great spiritual revolution taking place in that land as a result of these people systematically being taught that the system doesn’t work And it’s out of these people, these people who have been in these prisons, that the spiritual revolution is going to take place. He calls it a citizenship beneath the citizenship. That is, there is a series of islands, an archipelago of islands– prisons–beneath the system never shown to the public that becomes the place of teaching people on the real values of society.

When I read that I thought. “This is the handle I’ve been looking for for my life.” Because, in fact, there are troublesome phrases throughout Scripture that talk to me about my citizenship as a member of the kingdom of God, my citizenship as a Christian in the world, and I’ve struggled with how this fits. And Suddenly I realized that there’s a population within the population, not only in this country but in the world. This population is a group of people who, at the feet of Jesus Christ, have learned certain principles about life and living and the way the world is put together that causes them to have a unity and certain presuppositions that guide their lives separate from all political, national, ethnic, and radical economic barriers. And they exist over the entire earth, a citizenship within a citizenship.

They don’t always have bumper stickers and you can’t always tell who they are, like the Apostles with the halos around their heads. (You know, where they had the supper and said, “if you want to get in the picture, everybody get on one side of the table.”) They don’t walk around with that identification, but deep in their hearts they’re guided by different principles.

Thoreau spoke about this, you’ll remember. Thoreau said if you see a group of people walking down the street, or marching, and one man is out of step with the rest, don’t immediately conclude that that man doesn’t know what he’s doing or that he’s out of step. Thoreau said that perhaps he’s listening to a different drummer. He hears a different cadence. As I understand it, this is the precise teaching of the Scripture about the role of the Christian in culture. He listens for a different cadence. He tunes his ear to a different Voice and he marches to the cadence of God as expressed in Jesus Christ.

Jesus gave to us several illustrations of how this works. There are many minor ones, but I picked from Scripture three major illustrations of how our responsibility in the world operates. The first is an easily understood metaphor. Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth.” Salt has the function of being a preservative. It also has the function of being a condiment; it spices up life. It’s also interesting because, when properly used, salt is a minority. It doesn’t take a shovelful to salt a roast. It just takes a small amount of salt.

And once you’ve salted it, its virtually impossible to unsalt it. Did you ever try to unsalt a roast? Jesus said we’re sent into the world with a minority strategy. In fact, you’ll find the Bible somewhat less effective for you if you think of the Bible as a majority stance. The Bible doesn’t teach the majority how to impose its will on other people. It teaches a minority how to move into the midst of a majority and make a difference by the quality of their lives. They salt the earth.

This saltiness is a problem to some people. If you stay up late and watch TV–and I confess I do some of that. Most people say that the children happened to be watching and they happened to walk by and see something. I just blatantlywatch the thing, and as I watch at night, I see endless talk shows that seem to feature particularly libertine type people who advocate certain lifestyles that are contrary to Christian principles. And they have a word that sticks on their tongues. They can hardly pronounce it. In fact, it’s so obscene they can barely spit it off the end. They apologize.

You know, on late night TV we’ve gotten to where we can use certain little “adult” words, like kids behind the barn.

We’re adult. we can say these little words out loud. But they have words that are worse than that and they have trouble getting them off their tongues. They talk about the”Judeo-Christian tradition,” that awful stuff that we’ve got to rid the world of. If we could just get rid of that–these repressive, Puritan, Victorian, Judeo-Christian principles–we could solve the world’s problems.

The earth is saltier than we think it is. And these people know it Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth.” In fact. I wouldn’t want to start a new denomination on this, but I would equate the salt of the earth to Galatians 5 where it says, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy. peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. against such there is no law.” They can’t stop you from doing those things. But as you do them. people can’t forget about them–a cup of cold water, a visit to the hospital, these kinds of things. If you’re an administrator, do it well. If you have money to give, give it away gladly. These are the kinds of things we read about in Romans 12. Jesus suggests a minority strategy: salt of the earth.

Second, He suggests the idea, “We are the light of the world.” Now let me just suggest to you that in Scripture we hear about light. The Scripture says that the Word is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. May I suggest to you the Word of God is light; that is, absolutes in a world full of relativism. Now obviously by 8:30 this morning I’m not going to talk to you much about absolutes except to say that the Bible begins with an interesting phrase. It says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” You were wondering how it happened? God did it. God created the heavens and the earth. Now because God did it, this makes a great deal of difference. If God created it, then we’re all created beings. And if we’re created beings, then we have some relationship to the Creator, and it would follow after a few more steps that we’re not our own. We’re bought with a price. Our lives are not simply ours to do with as we please but we have certain responsibilities that are incumbent with this creation.

Now to bring that down to understandable terms, let me share an experience. We, in Youth for Christ, have a thing we call Youth Guidance which works with kids who are in trouble with the law. Each summer we take about 4,500 of these kids to camp. These are kids that the judges felt we could help in some way. They are guilty of virtually everything that kids can get into. We had a camp one time where we had unfortunately mixed a group of kids from the south side of Chicago with another group of kids from an

Appalachian group in the middle north side. And we thought the love of God would solve it all, but we found that these kids were quite creative. We had taken away knives and other weapons, but the kids eventually filled their socks with rocks. A sock full of rocks makes a quite formidable weapon if you get one of those up the side of the head. So some of our counselors were saying, “Is this what it means, ‘All to Jesus I surrender’?”

Well, one afternoon I was standing in front of the little Coke shack where We gave the kids Cokes. One kid sneaked up behind the other and hit him over the head with a pop bottle, one of those Nehi Orange that they used to have, and knocked the kid right down. He then jumped on top of the kid, had one knee on the kid’s throat and the other on his chest, and was hitting him across the head. I grabbed the kid by the shoulders, and I pulled him off the other kid, shoved him against the wall, and I stood there just furious and said,”What do you mean, sneaking up behind a kid and hitting him with a pop bottle?” And he said, “Well why would you come up in front of him? If you come up in front of him he’ll. he’ll . and the kid began to express that unique perspective that survivors get. This kid was really well-conditioned for survival in his neighborhood. And then I used this word, and this is the point of my story. I used this meaningless word with him. It went right in his eyes. through whatever else was there, hit the back of his skull. and uninterrupted, bounced back to me. I said. “You ought not to hit somebody with a pop bottle. – And that word “ought” didn’t register.

And suddenly it dawned on me. Where do we get the word “ought”? Why ought you not to steal? Why ought you not to kill? Why ought you not to commit adultery? If you’re bigger than he is, you can take what’s his. If you happen to be in political power, you can cremate 6 million of them.

Where do you get the mandate for ought? Lincoln spoke to this: “We have to have faith that right, itself, makes might. Not the other way. – And that moral absolutes come down from belief in God to distill the idea. We’re called to put forth absolutes in a world of relativity. We’re called to be the light of the world. It’s not easy. It requires a great deal of quiet debate and discussion. But Jesus said you’re the light of the world. And you’ve got to find a way to tell the people that the world has sides on it.

The world isn’t like Swiss cheese where we’re walking along ready to fall through holes any minute. Jesus said He’s a rock; He’s solid.

The third illustration Jesus used is less palatable than the other two. Jesus said, “I’m sending you forth as sheep among wolves.” Now that idea doesn’t appeal to me. I live in West Chicago and we have the Wildcats out there. I would hate to think of going to that group of football players and saying, “Boys, I’ve got this neat Christian idea. We’re going to rename the team. You’re going to be the West Chicago Sheep.” Somehow that wouldn’t seem quite fitting, to huddle down there and bleat.

That isn’t the point of Jesus’ illustration. Jesus’ illustration says that, “I’m sending you out into the world without franchise, without clout. This is a Roman world in which the entire political prerogative is in the arbitrary hands of very few people; in fact, only one person. And I’m sending you out, and you’re fair game.” Jack (Knuepfer) gave us some beautiful illustrations about sheep among wolves when he described what courage is. You are sheep among an electoral wolf or wolves when you make courageous decisions.

Dostoevsky dealt with this, you’ll remember, if you read his shorter novel, The Idiot. You read and think, “Why do I want to read about an idiot?” But what it’s really about is a man. Dostoevsky decided he would like to make his protagonist a Christ figure. He’s going to send a person who is as much like Jesus Christ as possible into the Russia of his period. And so he sends this man into the world to turn the other cheek, to walk the second mile, to love his enemies, to do good to those who despitefully use him, to do all these Jesus-like things. He gives the man inherited wealth so he has complete mobility. And eventually they call the man an idiot. Only an idiot would try to do those things in our kind of world unless he had faith in Jesus Christ.

Who would you expect to have an impact if, for instance, this had happened. Into one side of town comes a Roman general on a white charger. Its nostrils are flared and you can virtually see steam coming out of them. On it is a muscular man with armor, with that particular set of jaw and strength that comes with a commander. Into the other end of town comes a full grown man, riding on the foal of an ass.

His toes are almost dragging. The rabble of the streets is cutting bushes and throwing branches in front of him saying, “Hail, King of the Jews.” Given a choice as to who’s going to make it isn’t even a contest. But if you go through the population of the world today and ask people to start naming Roman generals, you’ll find they’re almost all forgotten. But if you go through the world and ask aboutJesus Christ. people can’t forget about Him. He’s irritating.

In fact, I was reading a science fiction short story, and I’m sorry that I can’t tell you the source. But it’s a story about a year. it’s the year two jillion or something. And the world’s great problem is the storage of information. Even with microfiche, they’ve got so much microfiche that they can’t store the stuff. There are warehouses full of it. It’s everywhere. It’s kind of like the article MAD Magazine featured one time about an infinite number of razor blades. If you keep shoving them into the back of those hotel walls, eventually, given eternity, the world is going to be full of used razor blades: in this science fiction writer’s mind the world is full of information.

So they decide to take the first million years and distill it into a phrase. And they selected this phrase: “In the year 1, Jesus Christ was born. For the next million years men tried to adjust to that event.-

You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth. You are sheep among wolves. We have a minority strategy. We move out in the population and salt it with and light it with and live it with events that people can’t forget. This is the mission of the Old Testament Jewish nation. This is the mission of the New Testament Church. to make this Kingdom statement.

I was watching a film one night. It’s not going to win an Academy Award but I think it will get onto Channel 9, late. again. The film stars George C. Scott and is entitled The New Centurions. Well, immediately when I see something with new centurions I have an almost religious need to watch. And so 1 watched this very interesting film. George C. Scott is a grizzled, veteran policeman who’s had all the experience street-wise. He doesn’t look pretty, the modern day anti-hero character. He has a young fellow as his sidekick who is just out of police academy with his brand new degree in Sociology, eyes about this big around, going out there to change the world. Well. he and George C. Scott run up and down the alleys of the world chasing people in the dirty, ugly spots. They arrest folks. They get behind garbage cans and shoot guns. It’s an unbelievable thing. They eventually fill their paddy wagon with women of the night and petty thieves and others and take their load into the police station. They dump their paddy wagon into the lockup and they go downstairs to change clothes, They take a shower, get on their civvies, and come back onto the street.

And by the time they’ve taken a shower and gotten onto the street, the folks they’ve just arrested are already out on bail.

They’re coming out and they’re saying, “Hello, George,” “Hi. Phil,” “How you doing, Nancy?”

They all know each other because George C. Scott’s been doing this with them for several years. The two officers go to have a cup of coffee and the young policeman says, “I’ve had it. This isn’t what they told us in Police Academy. I’m not going to risk my life out there on the street to play this game because those are real bullets and nothing’s happening.”

And George C. Scott then gets that poise that a fellow gets when he’s a teacher, and he kind of rears back and he says to him, “Have you ever heard of a centurion’?” The young officer hadn’t. (There are a couple words that I’ve discovered that unless you’ve gone to Sunday school you don’t know–centurion and leprosy.)

The young policeman said he didn’t know about the centurion. So George C. Scott told him. He said the Roman army was a rabble. They were amoebic life. They were mercenaries. They simply fought in order to get plunder, to be the first into the house to get the jewelry, the first to get the women. It was a rabble. He said. however, that every 100th man in the Roman army was a centurion. He was a doctrinaire Roman. He knew which way the Romans were going. And, therefore. he could keep this great mob of people heading in the Roman direction. Scott looked at the young policeman and said to him, “We, the men in blue, the men on the street, have a role to play.” He said, “The world is on the edge of madness at all times. It’s ready to tip into madness. People behave like animals. But we, as the men in blue, are the new centurions and our task is to keep it from tipping into madness.”

Well, I don’t know whether that is entirely accurate, but I will say this. This is a fair illustration of the role of a Christian minority in a pluralistic society. We salt the earth. We light the world. We even, if necessary, suffer for our decisions. Now this doesn’t happen automatically. There are men who do very noble things without Christ. I would be the first to acknowledge that I’ve met men without faith who amaze me because they do so much better sometimes than I do with faith. They’re a constant challenge and embarrassment to me. But my experience with most men has been this: most men and women without some external force and help simply cannot live in the midst of a majority and take a minority stance. There’s just too much pressure internally and externally.

That’s why, I believe, God did the coming. With the kids we have a little definition that we use. We say that religion is man seeking after God. But we tell them Christianity is God seeking after man. That is. man was weak Its not that we loved God but that God loved us. Love is a very strong thing to express. You may have tried this as a kid, man or woman. You sat in church. You saw her there and you kind of walked your fingers across the pew until you could touch her hand. If they took an infrared picture of the church where your hand touched hers it’d be throbbing right there, a great red throb. That’s safe enough. But then if you really love her- – I mean if when she walks into the room, you turn into an M M someone held in their hand too long–you kind of melt down. And when you reach out and you try to hook your pinky onto hers, that’s the dangerous moment.

Because at that moment she can say, “Get away. pervert. What’ve you got in mind? – And she can embarrass you. In fact, some people having been embarrassed in offering love early in their lives reach middle age and still can’t offer love because it’s just plain too dangerous. The rejection is too deep, too severe. God understood that and so He did the offering. Though He was God, He didn’t cling to His prerogatives as God’s equal but became a man and dwelt among us. He was so small and vulnerable we could have snuffed him out with a handkerchief. He was just a babe in a manger. “He was,” Scripture says, “despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid, as it were, our faces from him.” He experienced all human emotions. In all points He was tempted like we are, yet was without sin and offered to us His love. And He says to us as weak creations–that is. He’s the superior, we’re the inferior, He’s the Creator, we’re the created–He says, “I offer this love for you, but you must have the courage to reach out your pinky and, as it were, hook mine. You must believe. You must trust. You must put your faith and confidence in Me. And if you do, that will be the last individual act you ever do as long as you live. I’ll never leave you nor forsake you.” And you will be part of the Body of Jesus Christ, a group of people who also are listening to that same Drummer, who have a strategy in the world, and a support for one another, and bear one another’s burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ.

My prayer would be that you who are in government would sense this morning that you’re surrounded by people of good will, and people who do pray and do care about the very bedrock principles. We don’t always agree in methodology.

But we agree about these things. You’re surrounded by people who reach out to each of you.

And I say to all of you here as guests, some may be insulted by the fact that I would assume you are a Christian. You may not be. But undeniably, this is my experience, and the experience of those who’ve attempted to share with you their witness from this platform this morning: when a person puts his or her faith or trust in Jesus Christ in humility, his perspective changes. What this means is to confess one’s faults and one’s sin and invite Jesus Christ to come in and cleanse and take up presence in one’s life, in a sense, to have Him become your Drummer. It’s saying, “Jesus Christ, I want you to grab the steering wheel of my life. I want to follow you. I want to be part of this minority, this statement in the world.” You can’t get it by osmosis. It doesn’t just sneak through the thick carpet in church and crawl up your leg and get you. As a human being, one has to accept the prerogative of choice that is given, since you and I were created in the image of God. And then to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit and when He knocks–” Behold I stand at the door and knock – says Jesus–to open the door and let Him in.

I’ve struggled with what is the strongest stance I can have in the world. And I present to you this morning, at this Christmas Prayer Breakfast, that I do believe with the bumper stickers, that what the world needs is Jesus Christ. And I say to you this morning, I’ve found I need Him personally so that I can carry out these responsibilities as salt, as light, and, God helping, as a sheep among wolves.