Genesis chapter 2. Genesis chapter 2 reading from verse 15 to verse 25. Let us hear the Word of God. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, you are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For when you eat of it, you will surely die. The Lord God said, it is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them. And whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air, and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam, no suitable helper was found. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. And while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man. and he brought her to the man. The man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman for she was taken out of man. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and they will become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame. May God bless this holy word to us. Let us again turn to the book of Psalms for our praise. Turning to the 8th Psalm. Psalm 8 on page 6 of the Psalter, and we are going to sing verses marked 1 to 5. The tune is Warwick, number 226. The psalmist looks up into the heavens and sees the stars. He reflects upon how great God is, how huge his universe, and he asks the question, what is man? That's a question we shall be coming back to later this evening, and it's a question to which God's word has a wonderful answer. How excellent in all the earth, Lord, our Lord, is thy name, who hast thy glory far advanced above the starry frame. Sam, end of piece. There is one body and one spirit just as you were called to one hope when you were called, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. But to each one of us, grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. This is why it says, When he ascended on high, he led captives in his train and gave gifts to men. What does he ascended mean? Except that he also descended to the lower earthly regions. He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens. in order to fill the whole universe. It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants tossed back and forth by the waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming? Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work. May God bless this reading of his own word to each one of us, to our understanding, to our lives. that during the summer months we have been having a series of studies under the general title 20th Century Idols. And we haven't been looking at a particular passage of scripture as is our normal practice, but we have been taking these topics of the false gods of our century. We need to know those gods. those gods whom so many of our fellow human beings worship and whom we may be influenced by in subtle and unconscious ways. And this evening we come to the ninth of our study of 20th century idols. The last verse in the book of Judges is a summary of the theme of the whole book. And it's a verse which occurs several times in the book. Judges chapter 21 verse 25. In those days Israel had no king. Everyone did as he saw fit. Or everyone did what was right in his own eyes. And that is the writer's summary of a very tragic period in Israel's history. There was no king. There was no one to follow. There was no authority. Everyone was his own king, his own leader, his own authority. Everyone did as he or she saw fit. And that, in some ways, could be the motto of many people in our own age. People who are devoted to the worship of the idol of individualism. And that's the idol we want to look at this evening. The idol of individualism. The Concise Oxford Dictionary tells us that individualism is a self-centered feeling or conduct. I would say it's both. A self-centered feeling and self-centered conduct. Individualism is the belief not just that I matter. It is the belief that I am all that matters. I matter more than anyone else or anything else. It's the belief that I, as an individual, am the most important thing in my world. My ideas, my wishes, my ambitions and desires and appetites, these are the center of my world. Everyone did. as he saw fit. Individualism is the worship of self. Individualism is the determination to make myself the center of my universe. If I'm an individualist, I live for myself. I choose for myself. I plan for myself. And I won't take time to trace it, but it is very, very closely linked with some of the other idols that we have looked at. Two weeks ago, we were thinking about the idol of existentialism, a philosophy which teaches that what is important in any situation is what I choose at this present moment. And then last Sabbath evening, we were thinking about relativism. which says that there are no such things as absolute good and absolute evil. What matters is what I choose and how I view reality. So it's natural that we move on to individualism. I want to think briefly this evening of the roots of individualism, some evidences of individualism, and lastly, the answer, God's answer, to individualism. First then, the roots of individualism. Where does individualism come from? Well, I hope you're all able to answer that question immediately. It comes from sin. It has a very long and deep root in the human heart. Sin is essentially individualistic. One famous writer says, the model of hell is this I am my own. I am my own. I belong to myself. He pictures everyone in hell as holding that as their motto. It's a lie, of course, but they believe it. We see individualism right back in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve had been given a commandment by God. But they preferred instead to say, what do I want? What would I like to do? And they put themselves before God. And they thought that they as individuals were more important than God and what God wanted. And that has been the most basic element in our nature Ever since, we are born selfish. We are born selfish. You need to teach a child many things. You need to teach a child to walk. You need to teach a child how to talk. You don't need to teach a child how to be selfish. You don't need to sit down and teach a baby how to say me or I want this or no. They seem to know that. They seem to pick that up amazingly. It's instinctive to human nature. What we have to do is to spend all our time trying to teach them not to be selfish. It's instinctive to us. So this is a sort of a natural religion for sinners, to be individuals, to think that I matter. and I am all that matters, and if anybody gets in my way, too bad. It's instinctive to us, it's natural to us as sinners. So that is its basic root, its biblical root. But I think that there are certain factors in the 20th century which feed this spirit of individualism. People have always been selfish, and they always will be. But there are certain things in our life and in our century which accentuate this natural tendency to be individualistic. Strangely, some of the modern philosophies and beliefs and ideologies produce a reaction of individualism. The theory of evolution, for example, teaches that the individual is nothing. He's nothing. He is just a little atom in a great wave of evolution, of historical development, and he doesn't really have any ultimate significance outside the great blind movement of evolutionary progress. Communism again downgrades the importance of the individual. Communism teaches that the individual doesn't matter. His only function is to serve the state, to advance the revolution, to take part in the dialectic of history. Man is insignificant. And in an age when these philosophies have been widely held, people have reacted against them. And they've been told so often that the individual doesn't matter. that they have tended to go to the other extreme and say that the individual matters supremely. Or again, we are living in a much bigger world than our ancestors in the sense that our horizons are much wider. We have seen on our television screens the vastness of space We see every country in the world flickering on that screen in our homes. We are aware of famines and earthquakes and revolutions and wars and multitudes. We hear of global hunger and disease, of immense problems. We are bombarded with huge figures in the economic and financial world. We are told that we are members of a huge European community made out of many millions. This is the age of big business, the multinational corporation with its huge finances and payrolls. This is the age of the welfare state, when you're a number on a computer and don't matter very much to anyone. And that's very different from a century ago, where most people's horizon was a small town. I remember 20 years ago hearing of a woman who had been born four miles outside the town of Coleraine. And at that stage she was in her 80s. She'd never been to Coleraine. She said, what would I want to go away to Coleraine for? Well, you can just hardly imagine such a thing being possible today. And the strain that is put on us emotionally and psychologically is tremendous. Some of you have lived in a small town. I've lived in a small town quite recently. And I would go out and walk in the town. Every child in the town knew who I was. I went and preached, spoke regularly in the local school. They all knew me. Shopkeepers knew me. The police sergeant knew me. The bank manager knew me. You had a place in the community, everybody was known. You come to a big city, no one knows you. They don't know who you are, don't care who you are, not interested in whether you're living or dead. And people are oppressed by that. And they tend to react against it in an unbalanced way by laying a tremendous stress on the importance of the individual. And it's made very easy in our modern world by our modern economics and technology. We have time and money now to think about ourselves. You couldn't do that in many places a century ago, or even less. People were too busy earning a living. People had no time for self-awareness seminars examining the inner me. You had to get up early and you had to work hard all day and when you finished the day's work you collapsed into bed and the next day you get up and you worked again. And our age of comparative wealth and luxury is fostering the cult of individualism. It's the age of private transport. You get into your car. You sit in your car by yourself. You go down to the motorway any morning. Eight o'clock in the morning. There are all these little cells, these little metal cells. And in each little metal cell is an individual cut off from the world. Home entertainment is increasing the individualism of society. You don't need to You don't need anybody else now to be entertained. You've got your television and your video recorder and your compact disc player and your camcorder and you can go into your home with your family and you can have a whole world of entertainment in your own home. You never need to see anybody else. You don't need to interact with anybody else. You don't need to depend on anybody. There's such a dazzling array of choices in our modern world for many of us. That helps us to develop the spirit of individualism. You can more or less eat any food that you choose. You go into a supermarket, there's food from all the countries in the world. There's a bewildering variety. You hardly know where to begin. If you want to follow any particular hobby, I'd be very surprised if you couldn't get an evening class or a coaching course somewhere in Greater Belfast that would help you to do it. So there are a whole lot of factors that we haven't time to look at. They're all coming in and they're fostering this cult of individualism. What is important is myself and my development and my growth and my wishes and my happiness. Let me say something secondly about some of the evidences of individualism. A lot of it, of course, is harmless enough. at least on the surface, this has been called the me generation. Everybody's interest is in themselves. We're generalizing, of course, but I think it's a generalization that is some truth. Go into a bookshop and see all the books on self-improvement. You can improve your physical appearance, you can improve your bodily appearance. In fact, there are now books devoted to each individual part of the human body. If there's some particular part of your body that you're not too happy about, you can probably go into a bookshop and I would suspect that there is a book on that particular part of the body and how to make it look better. There are books on psychological self-improvement, on mental health. It's the age of cosmetic surgery and the fitness fad and so on and so forth. People are interested in themselves and making the most of themselves. And as I say, some of that is harmless enough. Although as somebody has once said, the person who is wrapped up in themselves makes a very small parcel. But there's more that is ugly and destructive about this individualism. There's a great selfishness today. A great selfishness in our suburban society. We have lost something which used to be in our Ulster rural life. And in our city life also. Concern for our neighbour. I grew up in a terrace house in what would have been called a working class area and people weren't nosy exactly but they certainly cared about each other. There was a sense of community. You don't really get that sense of community in the suburbs. There's a selfishness. There's the scandal of abortion where unborn children are being murdered because it's not convenient for them to be born. I don't want this child, therefore I'll murder it. That's individualism. What matters is the woman and her choice and her rights and her body and her future, and if there's a tiny little fragile unprotected life that must be destroyed for this God, well that's just too bad. There's the scandal of old people's homes. I know that many old people have reached a state where residential care is the best and loving thing for them. Their family cannot care for them properly any longer, but I would suggest to you that there are many more who have simply been shunted out of the way because they're inconvenient. In the town where we used to live, they were known as granny farms. The owners of these homes, they raised grannies. They made money from them. And that phrase, horrible as it is, expressed for me the horror of the reality. They were just a nuisance. Just a nuisance. They were just in people's way. So we'll park them off somewhere in some convenient home and pay other people to look after them or not to look after them. That's individualism. we're seeing the tremendous reluctance, certainly in England, of people to marry. The number of people who are living together without being married is spiralling upwards all the time. And the simple reason behind all the sophisticated nonsense that's talked is they don't want to make a commitment to another person that might inconvenience them or tie them down in any way. So we'll just live together, and then if either of us wants to leave, we'll be free to leave. We see the way family life is vanishing before our eyes. We recently heard of a home with several young people in it, and every member of the family has their own television set in their own room. so that each member of the family can sit as a lonely, isolated individual in their own room and watch what they want to watch, and you never have to consider anybody else at all. One writer says that the family meal is almost over and will be replaced by what he calls serial grazing. I-A-L, not cereal as in cornflakes. Cereal grazing. Members of the family will just drift down to the microwave and make themselves something to eat whenever they may happen to be hungry. There'll be no such thing as all the family coming in at the same time and sitting down at the table and talking together. Cereal grazing, you go down to the microwave, you make your own snack and then you go up to your room and you watch your own television set. Your own channel and your own program. You never have to talk to your brother, your sister, your father, your mother. You never have to make any sacrifices. You can just be totally absorbed in yourself. For me it's a vision of hell. Terrible, endemic selfishness. is coming into society more and more. And that selfishness also then produces lawlessness. Because people say, I do what I like. And the norms of society are rejected and we're back to the ethos of the jungle. Just thinking the other day how when we were children, we lived near woods. And in the summer we could go off with our friends and play in those woods safely all day. There wouldn't have been a soul who would have put a hand on us. The only thing your mother would say would be, make sure you're home in time for tea. You couldn't do that now. Couldn't do that now. We're reaching a stage you can hardly let your children out of your sight. There are many places in the mainland where women can't walk alone. It's impossible. Society, the structures of it, are just collapsing. And it's this God of individualism. I haven't time to develop it this evening, but I think there's also a growing religious individualism. Because we live in this climate, because this God is worshipped, there is the danger that we as Christians, although we should have said no to self, may be affected and damaged by this false God. There's a growing carelessness about the discipline of the Church. There's a growing reluctance to take advice from the Church. Many of my fellow ministers tell me in various denominations and certainly in our own, There is an unwillingness to support and to participate in what the church may plan. Some particular meeting or activity may be planned by the church for women, for families in general, for young people. If it doesn't suit people, they feel under no obligation to go. They don't think they owe anything to anybody. They don't think it's important that they should be there. If it doesn't suit them, they don't turn up. There's a tremendous stress in our own day on Christ as a personal saviour. Or in Northern Ireland, people will say, your own and personal saviour. That's not a phrase you meet anywhere in the Bible. Jesus is never spoken of, never, as a personal saviour. You have a personal everything, you see. Personal radio, personal this, your personal car, you have a personal this, you have a personal saviour. The Bible doesn't talk about a personal saviour. He saves persons, but he's the saviour of the body, of the whole people. Christians who are frightened by the thought of close fellowship with other Christians, talking to them, sharing with them, opening their lives, confining in them, trusting in them, they operate as individuals. The idea of the body is being lost. So much then for evidences of individualism. And lastly, and briefly, and more practically, let me say something very quickly about the Christian answer to individualism. There must be an answer. In Genesis chapter 2 verse 18 we read that God said it is not good for the man to be alone. That's the first thing in the Bible of which God says it is not good. Everything else in the Bible up to that point is described as good. God looks at it and it's good. God looks at it and it's good. And then here's something. And God says, this is not good. What is it that's not good? Loneliness. That's not good, God says. And people are coming to realize that today. It's one of the reasons for so much mental illness. That's why the cults are flourishing, because people are lonely. Have you ever thought of what an obscene thing a chat line is? That you pay money on the telephone to find somebody to talk to. People take that for granted. What a horrible, horrible state we have reached in society when there are people so isolated and so lonely that they will actually dial these chat lines to have someone somehow to talk to them. Man, it's not good to be alone. It's not good. Individualism destroys us. We have a need for community. Well, what is the biblical answer? Well, it comes from two aspects. First of all, there's true individualism. True individualism. Because of creation and because of redemption. The Bible teaches us, my friends, that we are not evolved from some lower life form. We are not part of some faceless mass. The Bible teaches us that each one of us is a special, unique individual made by God and known by God and someone who matters to God. That is who you are. That is what I am. What is man? You are someone whom Almighty God has made, and whom Almighty God knows, and you matter. And if you're a Christian, you're someone whom the Lord Jesus Christ loved as an individual, and for whom he died as an individual. and he hung on the cross for your sins and was punished for your sins and obtained forgiveness for you and he is a place in heaven for you and he is a work in this world for you to do which no one else can do a space for you to fill which no one else can fill a place in his heart for you which no one else can ever take. That's who we are. And that's what we need to tell people. Not to deny their individualism, but to stress it and to teach it and to explain it that we only know who we are when we come to know God and trust God and submit to God. When we forget ourselves and give ourselves to God, then we find ourselves. We as a church must demonstrate that care for the individual, that people matter. No matter how obscure they are, no matter how tiresome they are at times, no matter how many problems they may have, they matter. Each and every person matters. And then, together with that, we must also show true community, true individualism, and true community. The church is to be a place where we can forget about ourselves, where we can get beyond ourselves, where we can give ourselves to other people and serve other people, get outside of ourselves, knowing other people, and loving other people, and ministering to each other, and then out into the whole world. The picture of the body, with all the parts of the body working together, and the whole body growing. And that's how we're fulfilled. That's how we're satisfied. That's how we grow. We're not meant to be lonely little individual parcels. Wrapped up in ourselves, thinking of ourselves, our own habits, our own fulfillment, our own wishes. That's a miserable way to live. That's a destructive way to live. Destroy society. And people like that end up in a terribly, terribly lonely, bleak existence. Inhabitants of their own narrow, miserable little world. No, no. We find ourselves by losing ourselves. We gain ourselves by throwing ourselves away. We fulfill ourselves by forgetting ourselves. That's the pattern of the gospel. Christ lived. He lives because he chose not to live. He reigns because he died. He says the man who hates his life in this world will keep it. We have to go to people today and to speak to them with sympathy and compassion. To say, I understand the pressures which are on you. I understand the fears which you have. I understand how frightening it is to think that you don't matter. But listen, I have a message for you about the God who made you and to whom you do matter. and about the Savior who died for people like you. And if you will trust in Him, and if you will through Him give yourself to other people, then for the first time you'll find yourself. That needs faith, the gift of God. May God help us to resist this false idol. this temptation which is in us all, to make myself the center of my world. Let us seek that in all things Christ may have the first place. Let us bow in prayer. Father, we acknowledge that at times we despair at what seems to be our unconquerable self-centeredness. We fight a daily battle against it, every one of us. It is something which never seems to go away. We may overcome it for a time, Lord, but then it comes back. And it can affect us in the best and highest and holiest things that we do. We pray, Father, that you will so fill our minds with Jesus Christ, with our brothers and sisters in Christ, and with needy men and women and boys and girls, that almost by accident we may find that we have forgotten about ourselves. And so, Lord, in your wondrous mercy, have found ourselves. Help us, O God. Deliver us from ourselves. Lead us to yourself, that there we may be the men and women whom you want us to be. In Jesus' name we ask it. He thought not of himself, but of his people. And for his sake. Amen.