The Religion of Romance

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. What we're saying by secularists is this, and this is how David Dahlin, his book, talks about it. He says, religious observance hasn't faded apace secularization so much as migrated, and we've got the anxiety to prove it. We're seldom not in church. In other words, people aren't coming to church on Sundays necessarily, but they're in church all the time because everything has taken on, now, religious significance, okay? We now worship at our stadiums, in the gym, at the grocery store, at work, through our smart phones, in all our relationships. We now practice various religions of romance and busyness and politics and consumerism and escapism. Even parenting can become a religion for some. I don't know if you've seen that, when all of a sudden, it's like, oh, you're using this method? I mean, this is the only method you can to raise this child. Oh, my goodness, zealots, right? Right. You'll find people in our society wrapping up their identity and their schedules in things like diet or politics or sports or fitness or leisure or technology. Everything is about this in their lives. We are focusing on only four areas. Last week, he talked about the religion of busyness, that it has become now, in a sense, a measure of your enoughness. Does that make sense? If you're busy, then you must have enough going on. If you have enough going on, then you are worthy. If you're not busy, you're not really that important. Isn't that fascinating? Now, one of our friends here came up to me afterwards and said, hey, I'm retired. That doesn't even impact me at all. And I understand that to a large extent, except for the fact that I'm glad you, as being retired, may not have the busy schedule and that sense of push and drive to fill it with all sorts of things. I'm glad you've got that. But the rest of the world is looking at you and judging your worth based on your schedule. And haven't you felt that way? You kind of, oh, you don't have, what? That's a problem. You know, another, so we went into this all last week. One thing I do want to bring up that I didn't mention is sometimes you just have to stop. You just have to stop and put into your schedule a time to do nothing but commune with God. And when you don't have that margin in life, when you don't have that time on a daily basis, no wonder your schedule just seems like it's going from one blasted thing after another. And after a while, you just get to the end of the day exhausted. So I just kind of urge you to consider what time you can spend, not just Sunday morning for an hour, but what time you can spend during the week for 10 minutes here or there to just rest and let God be God and read His Word and pour out your heart to Him and let Him minister to you. That's going to make a huge difference. So today, we're going to focus on the second religion or secularist area called romance. Now the question is, how did this become kind of a thing that people are pursuing so much? Why have secular things become functioning like they're religions for people? And I think it really comes down to this. I know this, bear with me for a moment. I think a lot of people have lost hope. Hope beyond the here and now. To put it simply, they're not looking forward to anything. It's not like, oh, in 10 years from now or in 20 years from now, or I've got this future before me. All I know is what I've got right now and what I need right now. Hans Schwarz wrote a book called Eschatology, and in it he said this, we live in an apocalyptic age. An apocalyptic age is a period in which we presume to be close enough to the end of history that we can discern which unalterable course it will take. But since we live, however, in a largely secularized age, the horizon of hope is restricted to the possibilities of this world. And like a scholar, big words, all that stuff. The point is this. You know, and a lot of people are afraid, the world's going to blow up, fall apart, warm up, fall into civil war, be wiped out by a comet or some nuclear disaster or some pandemic. But at the same time, they don't know that there's anything that could stop it or anything divine or beyond that would be able to intervene and make any difference in all of that. And all we've got is what we got right now, what we can touch, taste, see, smell, feel at the moment. So eat your dessert first. Life is unpredictable. You only live once. All you've got is today. All of that sentimentality runs through, and when you think it's all got to be here and now, then of course, things that used to be good tend to be ultimate. And you've got to have it at the moment. So today, we're going to learn what hope really is and the hope that we have in Jesus Christ and how revolutionary that was for the early church, for Paul's period of time, for the people in Corinth, as well as today, and how it can imp...