Gentry Lee is a former NASA scientist whose colorful career has included designing satellites and working as a colleague of the late Carl Sagan with whom he produced the Cosmos television series.  As a futurist, he speaks around the nation about how, based on current scientific evidence, life on this planet is going to change over the next hundred years or so.  He also serves as a consultant to the scientific, medical and business communities helping them plan for the future.  I had the privilege of hearing him speak this past week at the Dallas Women’s Club. 

He had some fascinating things to say, for example, about how robotics will soon revolutionize our socio-economic system.  In the near future, when we enter a McDonald’s, we will find no human beings working there.  A robot will serve our Big Macs.  That’s very good news.  Maybe robots will get our orders right.  He also talked about how the mapping of the human genome will impact our world in more influential ways than all the major discoveries of the twentieth century put together.  This is the biological equivalent of Columbus discovering America.   Cures to cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other terrible diseases, such as baldness, will become reality.  Ours will be a world in which genetic engineering will bring with it many benefits but also a host of ethical dilemmas of which we’ve never conceived.  Right now, twenty-five percent of the tomatoes you eat are genetically engineered.  But, we are also fast approaching the capacity for medical science to create “designer children.”  Parents will be able to select from hundreds of embryos which child they want and then discard the rest.  Ethics aside, if children can be genetically engineered not to talk back to their parents, who wouldn’t welcome this scientific breakthrough? 

Interestingly, Dr. Lee said he believes there is a good possibility that intelligent life exists outside our solar system.  As intelligent or more so than humans, it may be too far out for us to reach or even discover right now but he believes the likelihood of us meeting this life at some point in the future to be very great.  What got my attention, however, was when he said that the day we humans finally meet up with these beings from another solar system will be the greatest historical event in all of human history.  Really?  Jesus might beg to differ. 

When the Jewish leadership questioned Jesus’ authority to teach in the Temple one day, instead of playing their power games (Luke 20:1-8), he just told them a story.  It was the story of a man who leased his vineyard to some tenant laborers, took a trip and was gone for a long time.  On three occasions, when he sent messengers to collect his share of the profits, the tenants beat them and sent them away empty handed.  Finally, playing a more difficult hand to beat, the owner of the vineyard sent his son to collect.  But, this time, instead of beating him, the tenants killed the son, thinking that some way or another they’d eventually profit when the old man died without an heir.

Jesus was confronting the indifference of the Jewish people to the messengers God had sent up until then; he was also confronting, beforehand, the ways in which they would respond to God’s son who was standing right before them.  The very one they were soon to crucify.  Then, he delivered the punch line.  He asked them the meaning of a scripture with which they would have all been very familiar, Psalm 118:22.  “‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.’”  Not waiting for their answer, he said, “‘everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.’” 

Now, Gentry Lee said that the most significant historical event in all of human history would be the day some creature steps from his solar system to ours and shakes our hand.  According to scripture, the greatest day in the history of man was when God stepped from heaven to earth in the person of his son, Jesus, took our sins upon himself, died for those sins and then was raised from the dead by the power of God.  Jesus not only claimed to be the cornerstone event in all of human history he went on to say that our response to him will be the cornerstone event of our eternal experience.

Fundamentally, Jesus was saying that truth is never relative to our response to it.  Whether we believe gravity is good or bad, for example, may have to do with whether we’re standing or falling in any given moment.  But, how we feel about it doesn’t alter the fact that it is one of the immutable laws of nature.  We either conform to it and watch our step or we are destroyed by it when we step with indifference to it.  Jesus was saying that he was the Messiah, the Son of God.  The very same one, John would later describe as the very one through whom “all things came into being.”  (John 1:3)  You may or may not believe in Jesus.  You may or may not believe in his death, burial and resurrection.  But, whether you believe in him or not doesn’t alter who he is or what he did.  It will alter who you are profoundly.  But, Jesus is who he is whether you accept him or not.  So, what is it that Jesus actually wants from us?  What is it that actually qualifies as faith or trust or belief in Jesus? 

The pastor who baptized me twice, Ed Crow, told me of an experience his daughter Judy had with her four-year-old son while driving down the road a few years ago.  The little boy began to ask about how to become a Christian.  His mom tried to answer his questions as best she could and finished by explaining that, in order to become a Christian, a person had to ask Jesus to come into his heart.  Her son insisted that he was ready to do just that right then and there.  Though she was reluctant because of his age Judy didn’t want to risk discouraging legitimate faith.  So, she pulled the car over to the side of the road whereupon her son prayed a prayer in which he asked Jesus to come into his heart.  After they prayed Judy pulled the car back up onto the road and they drove along for a while during which time her son was very quiet.  Finally, he broke the silence by saying, “O.K., mom, I want him out now.” 

Now, obviously, the little boy’s faith had not matured to the point of making a commitment to Christ.  He was simply speaking out of his literal, childlike understanding of what his mom had told him.  But, maybe he was on to something.  Maybe getting Jesus out of his heart wasn’t such a bad idea after all.  Obviously, having said that, I’ve got some explaining to do.  After all, we are Baptists and we hold to a once-saved-always-saved viewpoint of salvation.  Even this week someone asked me if it is possible, having asked Christ into your heart, to invite back out again.  Is it possible to become a Christian and then become a non-Christian? 

The writer of the book of Hebrews struggled with that issue.  Or, better said, we’ve struggled what he said when he wrote that, “it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, since on their own they are crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him up to contempt.”  (Hebrews 6:4-6)  Once saved, always saved?  Maybe there is another question we should ask.

Jesus never actually said that all that being a Christian involved was simply a matter of asking him into our hearts.  This is what Jesus did say.  “‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.  For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.’”  (Matthew 16:24-25, NASV)  In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus spoke about issues ranging from humility to servanthood, from adultery to marital fidelity, from false piety and superficial pretentious faith to openhearted generosity, from backstabbing anger to genuine forgiveness and from greed to heaven-centered values and a host of other matters related to justice and mercy.  And, at the end of the Sermon, Jesus said that the only one who had legitimate reason to have eternal hope would be the one who, in his own words, “‘hears these words of Mine and acts upon them.’”  (Matthew 7:24, NASV)  And, in another instance, Jesus said that all men would, in time, be separated for eternity, as sheep from goats, by whether they fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked and reached out to those cut off from society by their lawless behavior.  (Matthew 25:31-46)

Jesus could say disturbing things at times.  He could offer words of grace and hope to those broken and hopeless; he could also awaken to more serious thought those who believe that because they “asked Jesus into their heart” when they were young but pay no attention to his commandments as they grow old may be asking the wrong question when they ask whether once one is saved they are always saved.  The bigger question is not whether you asked Jesus into your heart when you were five or six or sixteen or sixty but whether you are following him as Lord now.  Put another way, what difference does it make if you say you invited him into your heart years ago if your life gives no evidence of his presence there now?  Jesus warned that, “‘Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.’”  (Matthew 7:21, NIV)  We are saved by faith not by works, for sure.  Jesus said that, if faith is real, it works.

Back in Brownfield, in my High School years, weekly dances were held at the National Guard Armory.  This was back in the day when bands were known by simple names.  The Beatles.  The Monkeys.  The Dave Clark Five.  This was long before band names like, Limp Bizket, Barenaked Ladies, Smashing Pumpkins or Smashmouth evolved from the lower end of the entertainment gene pool.  Anyway, bands that were Beatle-wannabes came and played in Brownfield and it cost a dollar to get in the door at the Armory.  You didn’t have to have a date, just a dollar.  When you paid your dollar, they stamped your hand with some kind of semi-permanent ink.  That was so you could come in and out of the dance when you wanted to go to your car and visit with close friends who also didn’t have a date but wanted to leave with one.  You only had to pay once and the stamp on your hand was good for the entire night.

Far too many of us have thought of a childhood decision to let Jesus into our hearts as a sort of permanent stamp that permitted us to come and go in the kingdom dance at will.  We ought to be asking what it is that makes us want to leave once we’ve come.  Many ought to be asking what it is that keeps them away once they’ve left. 

This little fourteen-year-old boy, Andy Williams, who shot up his high school in Santee, California a few weeks ago, is yet one more wake up call that this culture is abandoning its children wholesale.  He was bullied at school, for sure.  But, the more telling thing was that, when he was arraigned for his crime, no one, not even his father or mother, came to stand by him.  Confused and wandering alone in the no-man’s land of parental emotional absenteeism, he called at least three of his friends mothers Mom.  (“It’s Only Me,” Time, March 19, 2001)  We’ve materially blessed our children into spoiled-rotten oblivion.  But, spiritually and morally, most children in American culture have been abandoned

on the roadside to adulthood to fend for themselves.  If you think I paint with too broad a brush, please note that eighty-percent of the children in one of our nearby elementary schools are being raised by their grandparents. 

The real tragedy is not that we can play God by genetically engineering our children but that we cannot genetically engineer better parents.  God will hold those who choose to be parents accountable for how they care, or don’t care, for their children.  Most of all, he will hold all of us accountable for how we respond to his Son, Jesus.  That is what Jesus meant by the parable.

And, that to which his Son calls us is more than just letting him into our hearts.  It is a call for those of us who let him into our heart and held him secretly captive there to open the door of our heart and let him out into all of our life.  To set him free to revolutionize all that we are so that he is not just in our heart but so that we are following him with all of our heart as the Lord of all of our life. 

Having prayed a prayer years ago in which we asked Jesus to come into our heart, maybe it’s time for us to join with the little boy on the way to a mature faith and say, “O.K., I want him out now.”

Amen.