Something in my spirit wants me to ask if I can tell you the gospel. I know you know the gospel.
“Go ahead”
It’s a good review. Your kids need know it. Everybody should know it, right?
There are 5 points to the gospel:
You’ve probably heard just the middle 3.
Most people start with the concept of sin. But there’s one concept before sin. Which is the identity of God.
So if we have a pure perspective of Who God really is in His own Words: Him describing Himself, and we believe Who He is, then the rest of the gospel fits together like a puzzle. It becomes super simple, right?
I’ll say one thing about God and you say, “Agree or disagree.” Ready?
God created everything.
“Agree.”
You agree! Isn’t that nice?
God wants to be our Father.
“I do agree!”
I’d like to have a Heavenly Father.
God came to earth in the form of a man.
“I agree!”
You agree, isn’t that nice?
God wrote a Book.
“Like the Bible?”
Like the Bible.
“I disagree.”
You disagree that He wrote that. Okay.
“I disagree because over the years there’s been so many different versions coming out of the Bible.”
Yep, it’s under attack. So there’s a Devil, and he hates what God says, so he tries to twist and pervert and make the Cabbage Patch version +++.
“Right.”
We can talk about that, definitely. In God’s Word He says, “Every word of God is pure.” So if there is a Word from God, it must be (be definition) pure. There’s a lot of twisting, a lot of tweaking and changing, and I don’t like any of that. Because I want clarity. I want first-person connection with a pure God who loves me enough to want to communicate.
God is a really good communicator.
“Yeah.”
Yes or no … that’s a yes! So if God wanted to communicate, He would make things clean and simple. And He would approve, “This is My Word and these other ones aren’t.” If we had time, and I’m happy to walk you through it: the other versions, what they try to do is instead of elevating God … what’s the word, it’s kind of like using calligraphy. Calligraphy is like the highest art form of written communication. God deserves a calligraphy-level expression. There is cursive penmanship, which is a step-below calligraphy. And then there is just “printing.” So the modern versions are just kinda printing. We believe in the pure, clean, simple, 400-year enduring English King James Bible. There is no reason to improve upon it.
So God is a good communicator and God originally made His Word very pure.
Definition of God: God loves.
Yes or no? God wants to love.
“Yes.”
God’s greatest expression of love was in the form of coming to earth and paying what we deserve. So the whole gospel is: there is a God. God loves me. And I am not God.
That’s my point #2.
#1: There is a God.
#2: I am not Him.
Right? You already knew that. Kinda obvious. It’s hilariously funny. I’m going to give you a couple reasons why I’m not God. Number one, I get tired. God doesn’t, right?
Number two, I get really grumpy and can’t even explain it. Right? I need food. God does not.
I am not always the most awesome person. But God is.
Sometimes my motives are wrong. Right?
Sometimes my nature … I can just sense there is like a lesser-nature and there is a better-nature, and I struggle against this lesser-nature. God cannot have a lesser-nature.
He has to be pure in all ways.
Now God can get angry. I don’t like that part of God. I’m sure He’ll explain it to me later. When I get angry … nothing good happens. It never gets handled right. When God gets angry, from His perspective things go good. I don’t understand it all.
Anyway, number 1: there is a God and He is who He says He is.
Number 2: I am not Him. That makes me a sinner. By contrast. If we compare Justin vs. God, there is a winner. It’s not me. That separation … the Bible say, “For all have sinned, and come SHORT of the GLORY of God.” So God is up here, clean and pure. I am down here unclean and impure. I fall short of His FULL glory. That’s Romans 3:23.
Because there’s a God, there’s sin.
Sin has to have a penalty.
I did not set the penalty. I did not put the pricetag on sin. We can disagree about the penalty. We can think that it’s harsh or overbearing. But God made the penalty for sin. He made the penalty higher than anyone can pay. “Why can’t I pay?” Because God doesn’t want you to pay. God wants to pay it Himself. He wants us to humbly admit, “I can’t pay a price that big.” It’s like walking into a store where every thing is a million dollars. What in the world? I can’t finance this with my whole life! Right? God make the penalty for sin bigger than anyone can even comprehend. It’s not just physical death. I am falling apart. I am loosing my hair. I’m getting older; no longer 20. I try to pretend I’m 20, but I’m not 20, right? Most people agree the wages of sin is death: we are all decaying, we all die gradually. It’s a sad thing, but it’s part of the cycle. What happens after death is the big penalty. The wages of sin is death, and THEN is Revelation 21:8, it gives a list of 9 sins, and I’m on the list; I AM the list … that qualify a person for complete separation from God.
God made Heaven.
God also made a horrible place of separation from Him that God does not want anyone to go to.
And He made a way of escape. He made a way out.
I think there’s two appropriate responses to the knowledge of Hell.
#1: O-wow!
Like if we were to be offered the opportunity of not a polar plunge … but a one-second plunge into Hell with the promise we could come back out: when we came out … we would probably say, “O-wow!” Right?
It would be a really big emotional, mind-blowing experience, horrible; worse than we could express. All we would have is expletives and crawzy words and we wouldn’t know even how to describe it.
Hell is maybe designed to get our attention.
So that we are like, “Well, I can’t do THAT … so what’s the solution?”
Maybe God had to make a BIG problem so that we would trust Him for the solution.
He’s like, “I got it covered if you if you trust Me. I don’t want you to go there.”
Like you don’t want your kids to play in the street. Don’t do it.
Anyway, God made Hell possibly for two reasons:
To get our attention
To express the measure of His love.
This is insane, but just ride the train for a little bit.
If someone wants to express their love to another person, usually they go to work, and they earn a lot of money to go buy something expensive like a ring, or a house, or a car, or food for the kids … and they support, and supply, and provide. Their sweat, their toil and energy … My dear mother was crazy-in-love with my dad. Evidence: I am throwing the dirty laundry down the stairs, and I pick up my dad’s soaking, stinky, horrible, overflowing yellow t-shirt and I say, “This is so gross!” And mom instantly responds, “I love that smell: that proves your dad loves us!” Boom! Wow.
I guess it does. He works many hours a day doing drywall, it’s all muddy and caked and he poured-out his whole life into that shirt.
Anyway, so God made the penalty higher than we can pay. So that He could pay it Himself as an expression of suffering. We know there was suffering on the Cross. There was also emotional suffering. All the torment and separation we deserve was satisfied in Christ, Who was God in the flesh, Who paid the bill we could not pay … He paid it longer and higher than we can comprehend. Any thing you could describe about Hell, He bore. I don’t like to talk or think about Hell unless I can reconcile it by saying, “Hell proves that God loves be because He was willing to go to that level of suffering to prove His love for me.” I am worth Hell to God.
Like if God was going to buy me a wedding ring, He would pay for it with the pricetag of Hell, and say, “Here, I offer you this.”
Okay, I’ll take that gift!
So let’s backup and get a running-start toward #5.
#1 There is a God.
#2 I am not Him. That difference makes me a sinner.
#3 Sin has to have a penalty. The penalty is way huge-r than I can pay.
Revelation 21:8 list says: “But the fearful …” I have fear. God doesn’t have fear: He knows everything. Nothing scares Him. Right? But I am human: I am scared of stuff. “Fearful, unbelieving …” Unbelieving means it takes us a while to believe anything. Especially as we get older. If someone was standing on the street-corner handing out $20 bills … the kids run up and grab those $20 bills. The parents are like, “Wait, wha… what’s really going on? I don’t believe it.”
Unbelieving, that’s us.
Abominable means things that make God sick in His abdomen, because you humans are doing and thinking wicked imaginations.
Whoremongers are not content to settle-down with their spouse. Some reason, something wrong with our chemistry so we can’t focus on just one. We have a tendency.
Sorcery: pharm-i-ca-i is the Greek word for pharmacy. It’s any substance we use to comfort ourselves apart from God’s comfort. So there’s Southern Comfort in a bottle … or there’s Scripture comfort and spiritual comfort.
And all liars … I am a liar for two reasons. I don’t know the whole truth: I don’t even know your middle name. I don’t know how old you are. I barely can remember one of your kid’s names. So if I don’t know everything, can I tell you the truth about everything? Number two reason why I am a liar, and you know I am is because people tend to exaggerate. We tend to stretch truth. I tend to exaggerate other people’s problems and minimize my problems.
I am on that list.
Here’s the end of that list-verse: “… and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”
That means I have reserved parking in Hell: my designated space that I have to pay. Unless … Jesus pays it.
So in Acts, the preacher is talking about David and says, David saw this day “… before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his [Christ’s] soul was not left in hell, neither His flesh did see corruption. This Jesus hath God raised up.”
That means Jesus Christ had to have taken on Himself the full payment for my sin which included not just physical death, but also spiritual separation from God. He took all that on Him, with the pain, suffering, torture. He suffered what I deserved. Then He proved He had the power to resurrect. They whole key is the resurrection. The people back at the beginning of the gospel listened all the way up until the part about Christ conquering the grave. “No way.” Yeah! He paid the price on Calvary and He paid the price with His soul.
There are two reasons why Jesus was able to come back out of Hell.
He never deserved to go there. He didn’t personally do any sin. He was vicariously taking my place in spiritual prison.
The resurrection was proof God was satisfied with the payment completed. God poured out all of His wrath, all the penalty He placed on to Himself and then it’s done. What I would have taken an eternity to pay, He paid in a concentrated amount of time.
Number last one: I have to personally do something about that. I have to receive it. I have to not just acknowledge there is a God, I’m a sinner, I deserve a penalty, Jesus paid it all … then I have to trust Him.
You can agree mentally all day long.
I have to hear with my ears and … “But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on Him shall not be ashamed.”
Ask one of your kids, “Who is your mom?” They know it and they are not ashamed to say it.
I have to put my faith in Jesus Christ as my Saviour.
Very humble. Very childlike. To say, “Okay, I don’t want to pay the bill. I trust You to pay the bill. I trust that You love me. I want to receive Your offer of salvation.
“For whosoever shall call upon the NAME of the Lord shall be saved” Romans 10:13.
Name means His whole offer. His whole identity. I am calling out saying, “I believe what You said, and I am receiving the gift.”
“Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” That word “saved” means rescued FROM something horrible. I deserve the horrible. But He scooped down His hand and rescued me.
The next verse says, “My Father, which gave them Me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of My Father's hand.”
So when Jesus saved me, when I was 5-years-old, I called on His name: He scooped-down to hold me securely in His hand, and the Father wrapped His hand around in agreement that this person is not going to spend eternity separated from Me. Because they trusted the salvation offer. That is calling upon the name of the Lord.
That’s the ticket: receiving.
Do you remember a time and a place when you received?
“All the time.”
It has to happen once. Like if I ask you, “When is your birthday?”
“August 8th.”
That happened one time. Birth is not a long process.
The new birth, when Jesus met with Nicodemus, He said, “Ye must be born again.” And Nicodemus is like, “What? Born twice?” Christ responded, “The new birth, the spiritual birth. He that is born from above.” So He’s talking about a miracle of the moment. A point in time when a person says, “I do not trust myself for salvation.”
[That’s the only other option, by the way.] We won’t mention the Catholic system teaches that I am somehow responsible to do enough good things to contribute to this salvation. I have to do good works or be a better person. Sure, I should allow God to transform me, but as a RESULT after the new birth.
The new birth is where I exchange my sin for God’s Son. I get a new Spirit. I get a re-construction crew to move in and start working on me; re-arrange the furniture in my heart.
Ye must be born again. Then Jesus explained in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
There is a process of growing as a child. Like you’ve had 2 kids so far. It was horribly painful to birth a child, yet … have you exerted more energy, more time, more patience RAISING those children vs. birthing them?
Birthing them was a couple hours of horribleness. But afterwards it’s been years of patiently helping them grow.
So we all should grow as children of God. God has a pathway of planned growth.
We should believe Him everyday, that’s true. But we have to have a spiritual birthday to be born into God’s family. It’s really sad but the fact is we are born spiritually dead, disconnected. We have to come to the knowledge of salvation: recognize our position, or problem, see the Solution, embrace the Solution.
Jesus says, “And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand.” So He wants to hold me in His hand. I need to choose Christ. I am not choosing myself. My good works are garbage. My personality is not going to impress God. I need to accept God’s salvation offer because I cannot pay the price. I cannot pay for my own Hell.
Sometimes the government gives out free stuff, but this is GOD handing out a free pass into Heaven. This is the biggest, best mansion and rewards! The obvious, no-brainer choice of a lifetime.
No confusion. There will be evidence of salvation.
When did I get born again? I was 5-years-old and grandpa was telling a story, and one of the animals in the story died and it blew me up inside. Because I knew I was going to die. And I knew I wasn’t ready to die. Even though I was 5-years-old I knew I was a bad boy; I had beat-up my brother earlier that day. I felt horrible. And I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t fix the meanness. I didn’t want to be that way. I don’t want to be that person without outbursts of anger. As a 5-year-old there was insufficient connection between my heart and head and mouth to express all this, so I just cried. And blurted out something like, “I don’t wanna die because God’s not going to be happy with me.” And my grandpa took me and showed me we are all sinners, we deserve a penalty, Jesus carried the penalty, we have to trust Him to be our Saviour. And I said, “Let’s do it.” And we settled it. There is a peace. A calm assurance. Someone comes to move inside. There is a new nature. Bible says, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” That doesn’t mean instantaneously I give up smoking. Or instantaneously I am over all my addictions or automatically have new, good habits. Magically kind to everybody and never going to fall off the wagon. What it means is I now have a Helper inside, God is developing good character in me. He is helping me become who He wants me to be. He has a vision for my life. He has a baby to raise. A believer is a work in progress. My old nature is still inside me. We all wish the old nature could be gone. We wish there were perfect people on earth, but I haven’t met one yet.
Believers are humble people trying to allow God to assist them in being the best that God wants them to be.
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Witnessing to Awe-Gina