Welcome back to the podcast on this Wednesday.

Thanks for listening.

Well, I love finding sermons where Pastor John proclaims the God centeredness of God.

There are a lot of the sermons.

And rightly so, this is the cornerstone of what we call Christian hedonism.

God is thrilled with himself.

And without this point, Christian hedonism wouldn't make any sense.

And without this point, the gospel wouldn't make any sense either.

To make this gospel connection, I recently came across the following sermon clip.

It's from a conference message that Pastor John delivered in Massachusetts back in the fall of 1992 over 30 years ago now.

In this clip, Pastor John is setting the table for the doctrine of justification and he's setting the table with the doctrine of God.

Here's how we did it.

One of the reasons that it's hard to get a whole range of biblical doctrines across to Americans today is because there is a secular mindset that is radically different from a biblical mindset.

Let me try to unpack what I mean by a secular mindset.

A secular mindset is not necessarily a mindset that denies the existence of God, nor necessarily a mindset that denies even the truth of the Bible.

Rather, it's a mindset that rules man into the center and rules God onto the periphery.

It's a way of thinking that starts with man at the center and a cluster of needs and rights and expectations that man has.

And then it begins all of its thinking and moves out from that center.

And it judges to be problems, things in the world, and in the universe that don't fit with this beginning, with this mindset, with this starting point, with man at the center, our rights, our needs, our expectations.

And so what our understood is problems, our things that don't fit with them, or what our understood as successes are things that endorse them, that fulfill those needs, enable and establish those rights, and jive with those expectations.

And so you interpret the whole universe with this beginning point of man at the center, with his needs and expectations.

We're born with this mindset. It is not a modern mindset. The modernity puts certain twists on it and intensifies it through the media.

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