You can see it today. What do people love? What are the favourite shows on the television? All this celebrity stuff. It is endless: one after another. When you read even the world’s own press and their comments on these things, what are they, a constant parade of celebrities: serial adulterers, so petty, so small-minded. Even the worldly reviewers say you can’t watch the triviality, the banality, the emptiness of conversation, the lack of wit and skill, or anything of the kind, and yet this is what attracts so many. How human tastes are depraved by sin! We would all be in that position, but for God’s work in our hearts. We would all just be feeding on the trivial and the dirty and the petty and the banal. We are all here screaming out for Barabbas, a murderous nobody, rather than the Kings of Kings and Lord of Lords.
That vast crowd, that screamed for his crucifixion of Christ, would have chosen him if only he had given them their worldly desires too. If Christ had said, ‘I will suffer and die on Calvary to bear the punishment of sin for all who come to me, so that they may be eternally redeemed, and, in addition, I will get rid of the Roman forces for you and I will give you a better state and condition on earth’, then the crowd would probably have accepted that. If he had given them what they wanted they would never have turned against him. There are forms of Christianity which try to give people Christ and allow them to keep the world at the same time. As long as you give up your adulterous activities, your fornication and the very worst things, you can still carry on as you were before and have forgiveness and heaven and Christ. The preacher may not actually say that, but his own lifestyle sets an example, and there is a band on the platform and it is playing worldly-style music, and as one thinker said many years ago, ‘the medium becomes the message.’