The church (regenerate persons) is, in the new covenant, the people of God. One biblical image or metaphor for the church, or the people of God, is that we are the “temple”—the “temple of the holy spirit” (1 Cor. 6:19). Would not then pastoral ministry—whether in Toone, Tennessee, or in Willow, Alaska, or in Manhattan, be equally concerned—as a part of the ministry, in taking care of the temple? The location is not particularly important—in terms of worth or value. Pastoral ministry at least includes the task of shepherding a flock, of helping the temple be all that it can be, of engaging in that kind of ministry that will prepare the bride to be “holy and without blemish,” one day to be presented back to the bridegroom (Ephesians 5:25ff).

Editor’s note: This message was originally given to the Cornerstone Network Conference on October 7, 2023 in Jackson, TN.
I have long had an interest in Francis Schaeffer. I am 58, which means I was a college freshman in Monroe, Louisiana, in the fall of 1983. I have distinct memories of going to the Christian bookstores (there was more than one) in Monroe and seeing various books by Schaeffer. He was one of InterVarsity Press’s key authors during those years—especially when it came to books on social issues and worldview and the pro-life movement.
Schaeffer was born in the Philadelphia area on January 30, 1912, and died in Rochester, Minnesota, on May 15, 1984. Many of us may have become aware of Schaeffer as a sporty looking older man with a goatee, wearing lederhosen, and lecturing in the Swiss Alps at L’Abri (“L’Abri” is French for “shelter”). But Schaeffer was quite American. He attended Westminster Theological Seminary for a year (founded in 1929), where he studied with Cornelius Van Til. He transferred after a year to Faith Theological Seminary (founded in 1937), a newly formed seminary closely aligned with, but not controlled by, the Bible Presbyterian Church. Schaeffer was the first graduate of Faith Theological Seminary. I will not go into further detail on that era of Schaeffer’s life except to note one interesting item: Schaeffer himself was a kind of “presuppositionalist,” though Van Til offered significant criticisms of Schaeffer’s method. One time Van Til and Schaeffer were brought together to try and discuss their differences. In the midst of that meeting, Van Til was asked to summarize his own approach to apologetics. Van Til apparently gave a particularly insightful and short summary of his own position. After he was done, Schaeffer commented that he wished it had been recorded, for what Van Til had said was in fact Schaeffer’s own position exactly, and Schaeffer said he would not disagree with a single thing Van Til had said.
But though Schaeffer was a very American man, he is known to many of us through his work at L’Abri in southwestern Switzerland, about 55 miles east of Geneva. He and his wife Edith moved to Switzerland in 1947 or 1948 (I have seen both dates) to start L’Abri, something of a Christian community, study center, or place of respite. Schaeffer and others at L’Abri would lecture, and there was plenty of time for discussion. Through word of mouth, many persons heard of L’Abri and found their way to this Swiss outpost. At one point, the Schaeffers were receiving around 31 visitors a week. Luminaries such as Os Guinness and Hans Rookmaaker would make their way to L’Abri and would be influenced by Schaeffer.
Many of us who came of age in the 1980s came to know of Schaeffer through a number of key works dealing with fundamental questions of apologetics:

The God Who is There
Escape from Reason
He is There and He is Not Silent

Or perhaps we came to know of Schaeffer through certain works dealing with general challenges in Evangelicalism. For example:

The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century
The Church Before the Watching World
The Great Evangelical Disaster

Or perhaps we came to know Schaeffer through his interest in certain culture issues, especially the moral question of abortion and the question of the role of civil government:

Pollution and the Death of Man
How Should We Then Live?
Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
A Christian Manifesto

But Schaeffer was also intensely interested in what we often call “spirituality.” Thus, he wrote such works as:

Two Contents, Two Realities
The New Super-Spirituality
True Spirituality
The Mark of the Christian
No Little People

I want to draw a few insights from that last book: No Little People, first published in 1974. This book is a collection of sixteen sermons. The first chapter is “No Little People, No Little Places”—the title of this talk.
No Little People
The initial theme of this chapter is Moses’s “rod.” In Exodus, Moses was called to go to Egypt and tell Pharaoh to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. You know this story. Moses engages in a conversation with the LORD concerning what he is to say when the Israelites doubt that the LORD has really spoken to Moses.
Exodus 4:2 reads: “The LORD said to him, ‘What is that in your hand?’ He said, ‘A [rod] staff.’” You know the story:

(4:2–4) The LORD tells Moses to throw his rod on the ground. He does, and it turns into a serpent. The LORD commands Moses to put out his hand and catch the serpent by the tail. He does so, and it turns back into a rod.
(4:5–7) The LORD then tells Moses to put his hand insides his cloak. He puts his hand inside his cloak, takes it out, and it has turned leprous “like snow.” God commands Moses to put his hand back in his cloak. He does, then takes it out, and it has returned to normal.
(4:8–9) For the third sign, the LORD tells Moses that he (Moses) will take some water from the Nile and pour it on the ground. It will turn to blood on dry ground.

Moses proceeds (4:10–12.) to express concern about his own speaking abilities. The LORD’s promise is straightforward: “Go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.”
Moses still doubts (4:13), the LORD’s anger is kindled, and the LORD says that Aaron, Moses’s brother, will accompany Moses. The LORD promises to speak through them both, and Aaron—at least at this point of the story—will be the one to speak to the people on behalf of Moses (4:14–16).
4:17: Moses is reminded to take his rod.
Moses will depart from Jethro, his father-in-law (4:18), and when he departs he takes with him what is now called “the rod of God.” As Schaeffer sees it, the “rod of Moses” has become the “rod of God” (p. 6).
This rod shows up again in Exodus 7:15–17 where the LORD again gives Moses a certain command. Moses has gone to Pharoah more than once since his original call in Exodus 3. At this point in the story, the LORD says:
“15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is going out to the water. Stand on the bank of the Nile to meet him, and take in your hand the [rod] staff that turned into a serpent. 16 And you shall say to him, ‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you, saying, “Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness.” But so far, you have not obeyed. 17 Thus says the LORD, “By this you shall know that I am the LORD: behold, with the staff that is in my hand I will strike the water that is in the Nile, and it shall turn into blood.’”
A couple verses later (4:17), we read:
“Thus says the LORD, “By this you shall know that I am the LORD: behold, with the [rod] staff that is in my hand I will strike the water that is in the Nile, and it shall turn into blood.”
The LORD says to Moses (4:19):
“Say to Aaron, ‘Take your [rod] staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, their canals, and their ponds, and all their pools of water, so that they may become blood, and there shall be blood throughout all the land of Egypt, even in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.’”
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At its heart, the Great Reset is a conceited and self-loathing central-European blitzkrieg against the cultural, intellectual, religious, artistic, physical, and, most of all, moral inheritance we have received from our Greco-Roman forebears. 

Part I: The Problem
What is the Great Reset and why should we care? In the midst of a tumultuous medical-societal breakdown, likely engineered by the Chinese Communist Party and abetted by America’s National Institutes of Health “gain of function” financial assistance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, why is the Swiss-based World Economic Forum (WEF) advocating a complete “re-imagining” of the Western world’s social, economic, and moral structures? And why now? What are its aspirations, prescriptions, and proscriptions, and how will it prospectively affect us? It’s a question that the men and women of the WEF are hoping you won’t ask.
This book seeks to supply the answers. It has ample historical precedents, from Demosthenes’s fulminations against Philip II of Macedon (Alexander’s father), Cicero’s Philippics denouncing Mark Antony, the heretic-hunting Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem¸ and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Nietzsche contra Wagner. Weighty historical issues are often best debated promptly, when something can yet be done about them; in the meantime, historians of the future can at least understand the issues as the participants themselves saw and experienced them. Whether the formerly free world of the Western democracies will succumb to the paternalistic totalitarianism of the oligarchical Resetters remains to be seen. But this is our attempt to stop it.
So great is mankind’s perpetual dissatisfaction with its present circumstances, whatever they may be, that the urge to make the world anew is as old as recorded history. Eve fell under the Serpent’s spell, and with the plucking of an apple, sought to improve her life in the Garden of Eden by becoming, in Milton’s words, “as Gods, Knowing both Good and Evil as they know.” The forbidden fruit was a gift she shared with Adam; how well that turned out has been the history of the human race ever since. High aspirations, disastrous results.
The expulsion from the Garden, however, has not discouraged others from trying. Indeed, the entire chronicle of Western civilization is best regarded as a never-ending and ineluctable struggle for cultural and political superiority, most often expressed militarily (since that is how humans generally decide matters) but extending to all things both spiritual and physical. Dissatisfaction with the status quo may not be universal—timeless and static Asian cultures, such as China’s, have had it imposed upon them by external Western forces, including the British and the Marxist-Leninists—but it has been a hallmark of the occident and its steady civilizational churn that dates back at least to Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Pericles, and Alexander the Great, with whom Western history properly begins.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, assaying the inelegant Koine, or demotic, Greek of the New Testament in Beyond Good and Evil, observed: “Es ist eine Feinheit, daß Gott griechisch lernte, als er Schriftsteller werden wollte—und daß er es nicht besser lernte”: “It’s a particular refinement that God learned Greek when he wanted to become a writer—and that he didn’t learn it better.” Nietzsche, the preacher’s son who became through sheer willpower a dedicated atheist, was poking fun at the fundamentalist belief that the Christian scriptures were the literal words of God himself (Muslims, of course, believe the same thing about the Koran, except more so). If something as elemental, as essential to Western thought as the authenticity of the Bible, not to mention God’s linguistic ability, could be questioned and even mocked, then everything was on the table—including, in Nietzsche’s case, God Himself.
With the death of God—or of a god—Nietzsche sought liberation from the moral jiu-jitsu of Jesus: that weakness was strength; that victimhood was noble; that renunciation—of love, sex, power, ambition—was the highest form of attainment. That Nietzsche’s rejection of God was accompanied by his rejection of Richard Wagner, whose music dramas are based on the moral elevation of rejection, is not coincidental; the great figures of the nineteenth century, including Darwin and Marx, all born within a few years of each other, were not only revolutionaries, but embodied within themselves antithetical forces that somehow evolved into great Hegelian syntheses of human striving with which we still grapple today.
Wagner, the Schopenhauerian atheist who staggered back to Christianity and the anti-Semite who engaged the Jew Hermann Levi as the only man who could conduct his final ode to Christian transfiguration, Parsifal. Charles Darwin, ticketed for an Anglican parsonage but mutating into the author of On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and all the way to The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. Karl Marx, the scion of rabbis whose father converted to Lutheranism and, like Wagner for a time, a stateless rebel who preached that the withering away of the state itself was “inevitable”—and yet the state endures, however battered it may be at the moment.
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In Jesus’ various teachings concerning the end of time and His return there is a great emphasis on being ready.  So I have to ask you, ‘are you ready?’  He speaks about this readiness in relation to how we live, ‘do our lives show the evidence of being born again’?  Jesus wants us to have a sense of assurance, but there can’t be strong assurance if we are actively ignoring His commands for our lives.  So work with me through the following questions: Do I accept God’s verdict on my life, that I actually deserve to be separated from Him and punished for my sin? Do I see that my only hope is in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and that I will continue to the end only because His Spirit enables me? Am I asking the Holy Spirit to reveal to me where I need to change and seeking His enabling to be more like Jesus?

Chaos!  Don’t we just hate chaos?
It is one thing after another.  There is always something dripping or broken in the house, but that is nothing compared to the fact that there are people in the church on the edge of homelessness.  The kids have just gone back to school – and we wonder how they will cope this year.  There is that worrying lump, and the doctor’s appointment.  There always seems to be new bills to pay.  We are worried about elderly relatives or wayward children.  There are so many things that make life stressful.
In these verses Jesus speaks about very stressful events.  To those Jews He speaks of the fact that in a matter of decades the Roman forces are going to come in and destroy the temple – that symbol of their nations favour, security and pride.  What’s even more frightening is that at some undisclosed day in the future there is going to be the breaking up of the very fabric of the world.
How are we supposed to cope with those levels of stress?  We cope by remembering that Jesus is in control of all things and that He loves us.
God cares for us in the chaos (14-23)
Jesus had told the disciples that the temple would be destroyed.  Four of them had asked him when this would take place and what would be the sign that these things were about to be fulfilled.  Jesus now gives them an answer.
When you see ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ standing where it does not belong . . . then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.  The ‘abomination that causes desolation’ is the sign that the temple was about to be destroyed.  But what is ‘the abomination that causes desolation’?  The answer lies in the book of Daniel.  There this phrase is used in connection with the desecration of the temple—the introduction of pagan sacrifices to it.
Jesus is telling them that ‘when you see pagan worship in the temple then you should know that it is about to be destroyed.’  While there is some debate about what this act of desecration looked like the thing to note is that it did take place and the temple was then destroyed in A.D. 70.
Jesus then gives them some specific advice.  The events surrounding the temple are going to be dreadful and his followers are to flee to the mountains.  If you read the history books you will see that the temple and the city itself were destroyed by the Romans, and it seems that the Christians did take this warning seriously and escaped before the crisis.
so note God’s care for his people!  Jesus warns them so that they will escape this terrible event.  In verse 20 we read that the Lord even shortened the time of that tribulation for the sake of his people.  The God who is in control of history altered the course of history for his people’s sake.
Look back upon your life through the eyes of faith.  Weren’t there times when you thought you could not cope, but He actually got you through?  Hasn’t He proven that He has trustworthy?  He who spared not His own Son, but gave Him up for us all, will He not grant us all things? (Rom. 8:32).  Psychologists have discovered that the mind can not dwell on anxiety and thankfulness at the same time, so thanking God for His past mercies actually drives out present worry!
One of the things that I love about our heavenly Father is that He is concerned about everything in our life.  We may not be facing the destruction of our city and having to flee our homes, but that does not mean He thinks the small things are insignificant.  He tells us to cast all our anxieties on Him–‘no job too big. no job too small’ – because He cares for us!
Don’t be afraid of Jesus’ return (verses 24-31)
When the four disciples had asked their question about when the temple would be destroyed they seem to have associated the destruction of the temple with the end of the world.
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