Lord Jesus, we look to you for our
only source.
We look to you as the creator and
the keeper of our souls.
We know, God, that the task that lies
before us, Lord, is so sober and so
serious, and that there's nothing that can stand
in our way if we submit ourselves to
you.
We know, God, that we need your Spirit
to empower us and your truth to enlighten
us and to give us something to say
that's going to really make eternity change for
people's lives.
And, God, we don't want, as Christians, as
counselors, as witnesses for you, we don't want
to stumble anybody.
We don't want to mislead anybody.
We just want to sit at your feet
like Mary and learn from you tonight, not
be so busy in serving you that we
lose the grasp on who you are, Lord.
You're the truth.
You're the way.
You're the light.
You're the very source of our being.
And we know, God, that we can't do
anything on our own, so we ask that
you pour truth into our minds like light
into a dark room to burn out anything
that's not from light, anything that's not from
God, that the Holy Spirit would fill every
nook and cranny of our being.
God, we realize more than anything else tonight
that we can't follow our own precepts and
our own wisdom as witnesses for you.
We don't want to stumble anybody.
We don't want to mislead anybody.
We just want to sit at your feet
like Mary and learn from you tonight, not
be so busy in serving you that we
lose the grasp on who you are, Lord.
You're the truth.
You're the way.
You're the light.
You're the very source of our being.
And we know, God, that we can't do
anything on our own, so we ask that
you pour truth into our minds like light
into a dark room to burn out anything
that's not from light, anything that's not from
God, that the Holy Spirit would fill every
nook and cranny of our being.
God, we realize more than anything else tonight
that we can't follow our own precepts and
our own wisdom, but we need to be
enlightened by your Word, and that's why we
need to study tonight your heart, your motives,
your mindset, your reason for putting us on
the earth and keeping us here, and above
all, your truth and your love and your
mercy, your greatness.
Thank you, Lord.
We ask for your blessing on this time
together in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Okay.
I guess you're wondering why we've got such
a formal setting tonight.
We bought this old pew, I almost said,
this old pulpit at an antique shop in
Lindale, and we thought that when we got
our Sunday evening services in the cafeteria, we
could use it just because you could put
your Bible over here and the concordance over
here and all your notes over here, and
everybody would think you're real spiritual when you
preach.
We're going to study tonight part one of
what's wrong with the gospel, and it's called
section one, the missing parts.
You know, we really had trouble titling it.
We added parts.
It just sounded too many parts in the
title.
What this sermon or teaching or, for those
of you watching on video, counseling instructions is,
is four years of my life preaching the
same message night after night, adding a little
bit more, refining a little bit more in
concert.
It burned on my heart, and the thing
that burned on my heart is when I
got saved, I saw the world lost, and
I saw the church excited to win the
world that was lost for the most part,
especially new Christians are always excited to win
others, and, and I saw this big Grand
Canyon between the two.
I saw the church over here with brand
new baby Christians going, wow, yippee, we want
to get people saved, and I saw the
world over here going, you know, Christians, P
.U., you know, and never the twain shall
meet, you know, and I'd lead my friends
to the Lord, and when I led my
friends to the Lord, I led them to
the Lord the way it was taught me
that I should lead them to the Lord,
by either example or Bible study.
When I got saved, I went to seven
Bible studies a week, well, six plus church.
I wanted to get as much of the
gospel.
It didn't matter good, wrong, bad, fundamentalist, charismaniac,
it didn't matter.
I just wanted to feed on the Word
of God.
I was saved.
I mean, didn't happen overnight.
Took me two years, in fact, to really
get saved, and I don't, you know, I
prayed to Jesus in 73, but I put
all kinds of conditions on it, and in
75, I unconditionally surrendered to Jesus.
It'll be seven years this spring, being 1982
right now, and I went to Bible study
after Bible study, and I started adopting, of
course, I mean, I was like a sponge.
You ever seen a dry sponge refuse liquid?
You know, you know, whatever was poured in
them, yeah, you know, and I just received,
you know, I went to Bible studies by
pastors and Bible studies by Christians that were
just three or four years.
Bible studies by rebels.
Bible studies by boring people.
It didn't matter as long as it, if
I could go to one every night, it
didn't matter who was putting it on.
I wasn't particular.
I just wanted to hear the Word of
God preached.
I was naive.
I was ignorant, a little stupid.
Foolish would be a better word, and I
sucked in as much as I could, like
a plant.
Well, needless to say, I learned a lot
of garbage, and when I learned this garbage,
of course, being influenceable, influenceable, we'll pass that
word around, being easily influenced, I started preaching
and disseminating the knowledge that I gathered, just
like anybody else.
Whatever goes in the ear comes out the
mouth, as long as it gets in the
heart somewhere, and God blessed my foolishness, just
like He does every new Christian.
People got saved left and right, but the
problem was I didn't know how to keep
them saved nor really authentically get them saved,
so many, many, many of them fell away.
It was like planting, it was like somebody
giving you a big bag of styrofoam potting
soil.
Looks like it, you know, and it was
real dark and rich.
Put it in, wow, this is great for
light, you put the water in, it just
sucks it right up.
Put your plant in, it looks great for
a couple days.
All of a sudden, it starts drooping, you
know, what's the matter?
You put plant food in, and the plant
kind of sticks up for a while, but
there's nothing to hold the plant food.
It goes right out the hole in the
bottom of that planter.
I had the wrong ingredients, and then, of
course, like every new Christian, I got bitter.
I started going, why isn't this working?
Why isn't this working?
Then I started studying the Bible.
Dangerous thing to do.
Don't ever study the Bible unless you want
to have your thoughts and mind changed about
the truth.
Dangerous to do.
If you just want to go along with
the status quo and what everybody else is
saying about the gospel in Jesus, just listen
to what everybody else says.
Listen to teaching tapes, you know, today we've
got a new scripture.
When you and a teaching tape is gathered,
I'll be there in the midst of you.
Our fellowship now is with a cassette player
and the television set.
But just, you know, listen to everything, let
it go in, and you will be what
I call a spiritual schizophrenic.
You will lead people to the Lord, and
you really will with little seeds of truth,
because remember, anything that anybody says about Jesus
in the Bible, if you even use those
words, there's a little bit of truth in
this and a little bit of truth in
that.
People swallow it.
Some effect happens.
They go through the right motions, but it
doesn't take.
It doesn't take.
It doesn't take root.
It doesn't grow.
So I got bitter, and I started reading
the Bible, and I thought, wait a minute,
they didn't talk about this part.
In fact, they skipped from there to there.
Why did they leave out?
Wow, that's heavy, you know?
And so then I started blaming the church.
Well, don't ever blame the church.
I did that for a few years and
got in a lot of trouble with God.
Can't blame the church.
The church is a victim, and just like
any victim, just like Patty Hearst when she
was kidnapped, when a victim is a victim
long enough, they start identifying with the person
victimizing them.
They start disseminating the same garbage that they
start taking in.
So the church becomes a victim of a
lack of truthful knowledge being presented as a
whole, and then it starts propagating it.
Remember what I said the other night, that
whoever you hang out with, you start talking
and acting like them.
Well, let's make a long story short so
we can get to the meat of what
I have to say.
For three or four years, I did concerts,
and I preached, and I shared what was
wrong with the church and what was right
about the truth and how my heart was
struggling with the lack of truth that I
was seeing in evangelism and in the church,
and little by little, God softened my heart.
Little by little, He took the bitterness out,
and He started putting discernment and gentleness in.
Not that I've become the gentle giant that
I want to be as a Christian, but
I'm not bitter anymore.
I really am not.
I am really compassionate about the state of
the church, and I really see that we
need to gently speak the truth in love,
but still speak the truth, not ignore it,
not put it off because it's going to
hurt somebody, but try like a doctor who
has to hurt you to operate on you,
put as much anesthetic called love as he
can before he has to do the deep
cutting, and recovery will hurt, too, and the
doctor prescribes pain pills for that, too, if
he's a good doctor.
Not too much, not too long, so you
don't get addicted to those things, but enough
to keep the pain from really affecting the
way you live, and so that's what we
need to do tonight.
Now, before you can learn what's right, you
have to unlearn what's wrong.
Before you can fill a glass full of
sparkling, clean water, you need to wash the
glass out, and if there's a little residue
of Kool-Aid, you've got to wash the
glass, pour it out.
You can't pour clean water into a little
bit.
You ever seen that?
You drink, you know, hot chocolate, and you
get up in the morning, and there's a
scum on the bottom, you've got to wash
it.
There's scum in our hearts.
There's residue of old, wrong teachings that have
stayed in there, never got washed completely clean,
some of us, and you've got to be
emptied before you can be filled, and now
what I want to say before we start
is that some of these things are going
to be sensationally impressive to you.
In other words, they're going to shock you.
Some of these things are going to be,
what?
No one ever told me that before.
You're going to have two reactions.
You're either going to think, this is terrible,
and I don't want to listen to this
anymore, or you're going to go, this is
the greatest teaching I ever heard.
Wow, you know, Keith Green's really a great
Bible teacher.
Don't do either of the two, please.
Just say the Word of God is true.
Let it change your mind.
Let it change your heart.
Let it change your life, and then you
will change lives in return for what God
will do in you.
Now, what we're going to do, it's kind
of an experiment in teaching for me.
I've got this whole teaching written out in
track form.
We printed it in April of 81 in
our newsletter, and we hope to, anybody seeing
the tape, we're going to send a packet
of these so you can read along with
me.
I'm going to read a paragraph or two
or even a whole section.
Just read it verbatim, and I'm going to
stop and expand a little bit and tell
of my experiences that led to me writing
such things.
I might even say, well, if I was
to write this again today, I wouldn't be
as harsh, or I wouldn't be as black
and white, because I've learned more since, you
know, almost the years gone by since I
wrote this, and if you don't learn more
in a year about something you wrote a
year ago, then you're not learning or growing
in the Lord at all.
Even Charles Finney, one of my favorite Bible
teachers, who's dead but still alive through his
writings, through the Lord, even he said in
his book of theology, which is this thick,
he says, if anybody can show me where
I'm wrong, or if anybody can show me
some new light, I'll change like that, because
I'm not married to my doctrines.
I'm not married to my theology.
I'm married to the truth, Jesus Christ.
If you can clear off my window and
show me that I have a misconception about
something I believe, I'm not going to hold
on to that.
I want to hold on to God.
That goes for me, too.
That's why the negative and corrective mail we
receive here is very important to me.
I mean, sure, it hurts.
Sure, ooh, ow, ooh, you know, people go,
you're, but I read it, and I take
it to heart, and I pray about it,
and sometimes it changes my mind very profoundly.
That's what the body of Christ is all
about.
When this elbow itches, this hand must scratch
it.
This hand can't scratch this elbow, you know?
Can't do it.
It needs this hand.
That's why God says, were two or more
gathered, I'll be there.
One Christian alone cannot grow straight and narrow.
He cannot grow perfectly straight in the Lord,
and the more that are following God with
their whole hearts, the better, because they all
check and balance each other.
No one man has a corner on the
market of truth.
Not Billy Graham, not Oral Roberts, not last
days, not anybody has a corner.
God enlightens a certain group of people or
a certain denomination or a certain preacher about
one particular truth, and then from that, one
man will hammer away at that truth, so
the whole church gets it, and then he'll
lead them to something else, and he'll lead
this guy in the church to teach on
love and this guy to teach on judgment,
and you'll find that sometimes you'll find that
some of the teachers will sound like somebody
playing a one-string fiddle, but that's the
string God wants him to pluck.
In his own life, he's not out of
balance, necessarily, but in his preaching, he might
just be playing one chapter of the Bible
over and over again.
This is the missing link.
This is the missing part.
So tonight, we're going to go over my
one string that I played for four years,
that I'm not playing now, but okay, this
is introduction.
You have to open it up.
Look for the big white eye.
That means beginning eye.
I know that the title of this article
probably raised some worried eyebrows.
What's wrong with the gospel?
Okay, at first glance, some might say to
themselves, oh no, Keith has gone too far
at this time, but let me quickly put
those possible reactions to rest to the question,
what's wrong with the gospel?
I can easily answer, absolutely nothing.
Okay, now the reason I wrote that was
because by the time I wrote this article,
I'd already gotten a reputation for being somewhat
of a troublemaker.
We had just finished printing the first three
installments of the Catholic Chronicles and had gotten
a lot of negative mail, about 20%, one
out of five letters was negative back then,
and the Lord had been speaking to me
through the last concert tour in October of
80 to put down my message on paper
so that I didn't have to preach it
anymore, so that I could go on to
other things, so that I could go on
to my main calling in life and that's
leading sinners to the throne of God.
My main calling is for evangelism.
I don't feel that, I know that.
I still have more of a burden for
the church than for the world.
I still to this day want to shake
the church up and go, don't you see
what you're doing?
Because I see the way to win the
world is to make the church holy.
Because as Leonard Ravenhill says, you never have
to advertise a fire.
You know, when there's a big fire, everybody's
driving to see it.
You don't have to say, you know, in
the paper, we'll come and see our fire
tomorrow night.
Our church will burn down for Christ, you
know.
You don't need to do that.
So my burden is still to the church
on fire, but God's calling me to preach
for the lost.
And I guess the main message for me
from God is that he wants me to,
by example, do what's right, instead of trying
to wring the neck of the church.
And you won't find a lot of this
preaching in my concert crusades, although I will
address somewhat the state of some Christians who
are not really Christians.
My main thrust in the crusades is dealing
with how to give your life to Christ
and how to follow him and how to
turn from sin to a life of holiness
and serving Jesus.
So I wrote this as an apology before
I start for those that might think that
I'm just getting off on a tangent.
Okay, I can easily answer absolutely nothing that's
wrong with the gospel.
That is, of course, if you're talking about
the gospel of the Bible, the very message
that Jesus preached and what the apostles Peter,
Paul, John, and the others devoted their very
lives and deaths to.
Now, by the way, there's a lot of
scripture, scriptural references in these.
We're not going to go into, we'd be
here for hours if we looked up every
reference, but if you have the time to
study this and look up at least the
references given in the main text, and maybe
some of the ones down on the bottom
in the footnotes, it would be helpful for
you to see the biblical backing of this
message, the biblical thrust of this message.
I didn't just sit down and try to
think up something that would be good to
raise the dust of the church.
This is years of study and prayer and
being led to preach, so I would, as
you go back over your notes or go
back over your studies, I'd like you to
look up these scriptures, at least the ones
in the main text.
Okay, second paragraph.
No, there's nothing at all wrong with this
message from heaven, but what about the stuff
that's being preached today?
Is it truly gospel preaching?
Are the evangelists that preach in churches and
arenas on radio and television, are they preaching
what Jesus called the gospel?
What about the mountains of modern gospel literature?
You know, the tracts, pamphlets, comic books, newspapers,
etc.
Do they really contain the same message, the
whole message about the salvation that Jesus offered?
How are we answering the awesome question that
people are still asking the church as they
asked in the day of Pentecost?
Men and brethren, what shall we do to
be saved?
People are still asking that.
They really are.
They might not be asking it outwardly of
Christians because Christians embarrass them.
The truth embarrasses people.
Have you ever noticed how hard it is
for you and your dad or you and
your mom to hug?
You know, to really give them a big
hug.
You know how there's kind of like a
wall between you?
That's not true in some cases, but in
a lot of cases it's embarrassing.
It's usually with one parent, you know.
Your mom usually who's kissed you and hugged
you a lot while you were growing up
might not have, you might not have had
as much trouble with, but your dad, you
know, who might have been cold and reserved
and everything.
You know, when you're a grown-up, when
you're 20 or 25, it's kind of hard
to hug him, you know, because it's just
not usual.
Well, that's the way that Christians, I mean,
that the world looks at Christians.
We're embarrassing.
We're all gushy.
We're all vibrant.
We're all alive.
We're supposed to be anyway.
And they look at us and we say,
Hey, do you know where you're going when
you die?
You know, or, you know, uh, do you
know Jesus loves you?
Or do you know all these kind of
corny ways of witnessing that people use?
And they just, you know, it's like kind
of scratching your fingers on the blackboard, you
know, just kind of rubs people definitely the
wrong way.
They're not used to people dealing with things
like eternity and death and hell.
Golly, you know, so, um, um, people are
asking that question.
What do I do to be saved from
this mess of life?
What do I do to get out of
this death trap called life on earth?
That's what I asked myself.
And that's what every one of you who
are sitting here tonight, ask yourself, or you
wouldn't be a Christian.
Now, if you're a Christian because somebody else
talked you into it, you're probably not a
Christian.
Now, it doesn't mean that somebody else couldn't
have instilled the question into you or made
you think about it.
But if you're a Christian, cause mommy and
daddy allegedly go down the aisle when you're
five years old, and that's your experience with
Christianity, then you haven't had your own Waterloo
face to face with God yet.
And you need to have it.
And I'm not going to give an altar
call.
We'll get to that next meeting, you know,
but, um, what I'm dealing with here is
the difference between the gospel of the Bible
and the gospel that is being preached today.
There is a difference.
If you don't think there's a difference, a
big difference, a Grand Canyon, as I called
it before, between the gospel of the Bible
and the modern gospel being preached today, then
why aren't we having the results that the
early gospel had?
As, uh, I was just meeting with my
brother Leonard tonight, Leonard Ravenhill.
He says, the only proof of apostolic succession
is apostolic success.
You know, a lot of churches claim that
they're direct descendants of the apostles.
He says, well, if they have apostolic succession,
then they're going to have to have apostolic
success, or all it is is physical succession.
It isn't a spiritual.
That's a little deep.
Okay, is our gospel the gospel?
I believe with all my heart that Jesus
would be ashamed of most of the gospel
messages and sermons that are being preached today,
mainly because they lack almost every major point
he himself preached on.
How dare we try to change the gospel?
We remove most of its vital parts and
replace them with artificial limbs of our own.
Vital parts, um, in medical terms is organs.
Your vital parts is your heart, your lungs,
your kidneys, your liver.
Isn't Jesus the master evangelist?
Shouldn't we judge our evangelism by his example?
Was his message anything like what we're hearing
today?
It is my intention to try and briefly
cover in this section each of the major
parts of the gospel that have been surgically
removed in most of today's preaching, and in
section two, we will go over each of
the new additions that have become a very
part of our modern gospel.
Okay, about Jesus being the master evangelist.
Many people read the Bible with different glasses
on, okay?
They call it, you know, you've heard that
he looks at the world through rose-colored
glasses and everything's you know, or, you know,
he's a pessimist.
He looks at the world through dark glasses.
Well, what's called our mindset or our grid
is the glasses we look through, and it
colors everything we see.
If we have a theological bent this way,
then every scripture we'll look at through those
glasses.
If we have a theological bent this way,
we'll look at through that.
If you are into grace, you know, you're
into, well, it's okay, we can do anything
we want to, and Jesus loves us anyway,
then you'll see through your glasses and all
the scriptures that don't say that will kind
of just disappear, and all the ones that
say what you like to hear will be
there, and if you're the other, if you're
a law freak, you know, well, you've got
to work for Christ, you know, you've got
to do everything right, or God's going to
come after you with a club, you know,
and all the scriptures that are heavy are
going to just jump out of the page
at you.
Wow, you know, and the other one's about
grace.
Yeah, that's cool too.
So what we've got to do is take
off our glasses tonight.
We've got to take off our grid.
Me too.
And look at the gospel.
Look at the Bible as a whole.
What is God's mindset?
What is his attitude?
Now, isn't Jesus the master evangelist?
What I'm saying is, Billy Graham isn't the
master evangelist.
Oral Roberts isn't the master evangelist.
Keith Green isn't the master evangelist.
Jesus Christ is the master everything.
He's the master healer.
If we want to find out how to
heal, we better look and find out what
his attitude was toward healing, toward sick, toward
restoring people's health, toward demons, or whatever.
If we want to find out how to
deal with sin, then we've got to look
at his attitude toward sin, not our pastor's
attitude, not last day's attitude, but Jesus Christ's
attitude toward sin.
What was his attitude?
That should definitely be our attitude.
We should try to have an attitude like
him.
And so instead of judging Jesus's word by
what the pastor says, we need to judge
the pastor says by what the Bible says.
We need to look at last day's literature.
We need to look at our bulletin from
church.
We need to look at streams in the
desert or our squirts in the wilderness through
what the Bible says.
Couldn't help it.
Okay, to remove parts of the gospel, the
blood of Jesus, it's a fact that the
very word blood scares people.
Now I remember when I was a new
Christian, I was brought up in a religion
that was what's called metaphysical religion.
I was brought up in a religion called
Christian science.
It didn't believe that Jesus's physical death had
anything to do with salvation.
It didn't believe that the devil was real,
or that sin was real, or that sickness
was real, or that death was real.
In fact, every time you'd go to church,
you just kind of disappeared.
You weren't there.
And you know, I was a vegetarian for
three years.
And it wasn't for health reasons.
I thought it was morally wrong to kill
and eat animals.
And when I became a Christian, well, really
the year before I got saved, when I
was looking into Jesus, I found out he
ate lamb on the Passover.
I said, hallelujah.
I went out and had a barbecue pork
sandwich.
I said, hey, if my master, and at
that time, Jesus wasn't my Lord and Savior
yet a year before I got saved, but
I called him my master.
I was into Eastern religions and I was
into gurus.
And I said, well, if all the Eastern
religions, everybody in every Eastern religion says that
Jesus is one of the gurus, they do.
The Hindus, you know, say he was an
incarnation of Krishna.
The Buddhists say he was a Buddha.
All the cults, every one of the cults
uses parts of the Bible and teachings of
Jesus that he's one of the ascended masters.
Well, I kind of put like a, you
know what acetate is, a kind of clear
plastic where you've got building plans and they've
got overlays, they call them, you know, you
got the walls and then they put the
ceiling on, they put the coloring, or it's
like a, you know, a four color separation.
Well, I put all the world's, I put
all the world's religions down in my mind
as an overlay, right?
Hinduism, they said, you know, that Krishna was
cool and Buddha was kind of cool.
And even the Mohammedans said Jesus was a
prophet.
Even the Jews said he was a nice
rabbi.
They didn't call him a demented liar.
So I put all the world religions down
and it all pointed to Jesus.
Every single one overlapped at him.
You know, the Buddhists didn't say that Mohammed
was cool.
The Christians didn't say that Buddha was cool,
but they all said Jesus was one of
the ways to God.
And then I figured, well, what did Jesus
say?
He says, I'm the only way.
You know, they all said he's one of
the ways.
He says, that's right, but I'm the only
way.
They're none of the ways.
So when I put all these things down,
yeah, when I put all these overlays down,
it all pointed to Jesus.
So I said, well, you know, Todd, my,
one of my best friends at the time,
he was following Krishna.
I said, well, and he was following Krishna
through a guy named Yogananda, who was a
modern day guru to lead him to Krishna,
you know, or Allah or whatever.
And I said, well, you know, I don't
feel comfortable with that because Jesus said that
he was the only way and Yogananda said
he was one of the ways.
So why don't I just go with the
best bet?
You know, go with the winner, right?
So I made Jesus my guru.
I did.
I said, I said that Jesus Christ was
my guru.
When I put the cross on, I said,
Jesus, you know, all the ascended masters in
Eastern, you know, grasshopper, you know, they're all
pointing to you and you point to only
you, you know, they're all pointing to you
and you're going me, you know?
So I said, all right, I'll, I'll buy
it.
You're my guru.
So at that time, I was coming out
of a Christless, bloodless, crossless religion called Christian
science into Eastern religions, which, you know, was
kind of out there in outer space.
And I was a vegetarian and I wore
a rope, a woven cloth belt and, and,
and, you know, rubber thongs and, and man
-made, you know, leather, the man-made leather,
the vinyl stuff and I had vinyl coats.
And you know, I, I just, man, if
people made me vegetable soup, I asked them
if they used beef broth or vegetable broth,
you know, if, if you want, you couldn't
have Mexican food that was cooked in lard,
it had to be cooked in Crisco or
vegetable short.
I mean, I was pure, you know, pimples
and all.
And so when I got saved right out
of vegetarian Eastern Christian scientism, somebody started preaching
about the blood of Christ in my hair,
you know, kind of stood up, you know,
blood.
I got to fix this again.
Blood.
Are you kidding?
Blood.
Every time they said it, they gave me
the willing thought of Dracula, you know, blood.
And so I understand we live in a
bloodless society.
You know, you go for Colonel Sanders.
You don't see the chicken running around without
his head when they cut his head off.
You know, we had, we had a cow
out here on the thing and he died
on us and we took a machete and
had to cut him up and serve him
for dinner, you know, and some of the
girls didn't want to eat it.
And I understood why we pulled his skin
off and everything.
This is, you know, you have to, you
know, leave the room.
It's okay.
But it was the same kind of meat
that we got in the market, but it
wasn't with a nice little package with all
the blood drained off all the eyeballs taken
out.
You know, it was just pre-packaged.
Like, you know, they asked these kids in
Oregon, where milk came from?
They said, the store.
Everything in our life is so pre-packaged,
including the gospel.
And today we've got a bloodless Jesus, a
nice pre-packaged colorful carton, you know, by
now Christianity.
And so when, when you talk about the
blood, which the Bible does over and over
and over and over again, people get the
willies, even Christians, because they're not used to
hearing about the blood.
The pastors usually nicely pass over the scriptures
on the blood because it's not as civilized
anymore.
And they say it's outdated because the only
reason Paul talks much about the blood was
because the Jews were into the blood sacrifice.
And so they had to keep relating Jesus
to the Passover land.
But I don't agree without the shedding of
blood, there's no remission of sin.
There must be a blood sacrifice.
There must be a blood atonement.
It's the law and wisdom of God.
And unless we present Jesus as that Passover
lamb of the Old Testament, unless we realize
the Old Testament is necessary for the New
Testament to come, the type of Christ in
the law of Moses is so important.
We don't need to preach the law of
Moses that much.
We don't need to preach and teach in
a gospel meeting all about Leviticus and start
memorizing Leviticus.
But we need to at least present the
fact that there needs to be required by
the law of God a shedding of blood.
Jesus did it so you don't have to
shed blood.
You don't have to shed animal blood anymore.
Isn't that beautiful?
You don't have to take your cocker spaniel
or your pet pony or something down to
the priest and have him slit his throat.
Jesus shed the blood.
But we need to continue to lift that
shed blood up as a remission for sin.
Let's read on.
It's a fact that the very word blood
scares people.
It's also a fact that the blood of
Christ scares the devil because it is the
only cleansing agent for a sin sick soul.
You know what a cleansing agent is?
Bon Ami, you know?
It'll scrub your soul.
You better believe it.
Can you imagine what the preaching and writings
of Paul would have been like if he
had been as squeamish in proclaiming the magnificent
power and beauty of the blood of Jesus
as our generation of preachers are?
What we have now is a bloodless gospel.
Today people are afraid to think and preachers
are afraid to make them.
The whole concept of Jesus being the Passover
Lamb of the Old Testament has been lost.
Quote, it takes too much time and thought
to explain, you will hear some say.
Quote, we need to simplify the gospel so
that we can reach the masses.
Oh, what logic.
Remove the blood from the preaching of the
gospel and you remove the power to conquer
the devil for the souls of men.
You better believe that.
I'm not saying you got to stand up
and say the blood this and the blood
that.
You just have to explain the concept that
without the shedding of blood according to the
law of Moses, which Jesus came to fulfill,
and you better believe it.
He didn't come to abolish the law and
he didn't come to say, you don't need
that.
He says, that's God's wisdom and I'm going
to fulfill it.
I'm the Lamb.
What did John the Baptist say when Jesus
showed up at the Jordan River to be
baptized?
Behold, the Lamb of God that takes away
the sin of the world.
He lifted Jesus up as what?
As the Messiah?
As the Savior?
No, the Lamb.
Quiet, docile, sad, to be butchered and slaughtered
and bled for you and me.
And it wasn't the physical death so much,
but the offering of his soul to God.
Sure, he physically died.
Sure, he was mutilated and beaten, but that
wasn't the greatest pain.
He offered his soul, it says in Isaiah
53, as a propitiation, which means taking away
the curse as an offering to God so
that God's anger could be turned from each
and every one of us.
And you and I both know that God
has every right to be angry with you
and me for hurting him and for turning
away from ripping our lives off.
We have stolen our lives from God.
They belong to him from the day we're
born.
And we grew up and we learned the
ways of the world.
Amen.
Do your own thing if it feels good,
do it.
You know, watch out for number one and
all that other secular garbage.
And we ripped our lives away from the
Savior.
And before, you know, he died before we
were born.
He already had it all taken care of
before you and I walked on the earth.
You know, a thousand, almost two thousand years
ago, he'd taken care of it.
You just needed to find out about it,
believe it, have faith in it, and walk
in it, and you're saved.
Okay, the cross of Jesus also is a
missing part of the gospel.
Paul said, I determined to know nothing among
you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
Halleluiah.
I determined to know nothing among you except
Jesus Christ and him crucified.
Why not just Jesus Christ?
Why not?
Because Jesus Christ death.
Why did Jesus come to the earth?
To die.
He didn't come to live, he came to
die.
Anybody can live, but not everybody can die
for the sins of the whole world and
then raise in conquering death.
That was his whole purpose for coming.
The Reverend Moon has the blasphemy to say
that he missed his calling by dying, that
he should have gotten married and set up
a celestial kingdom like he's doing on his
limb yet.
What blasphemy.
Jesus came specifically to die, and he told
his disciples over and over again, I'm going
to die and be raised on the third
day.
I'm going to die and be raised on
the third day.
I'm going to die and be raised on
the third day.
And what was the saddest day of Jesus'
life?
The day that we all say hallelujah for
he has risen?
The resurrection morning.
He told all these dunces he was going
to raise on the third day, and nobody
was there to meet him when he came
out of the tomb.
Not one.
And he told them, blank, point blank, literally,
word for word, I'm going to raise on
the third day.
Now what is the cross of Christ?
What does it mean Jesus Christ and him
crucified?
Let's go on.
Nowadays it isn't Jesus Christ and him crucified,
it's Jesus Christ and what he can do
for you.
You cannot have more exact opposites than the
Bible's Christ-centered gospel and our modern crossless
me-centered gospel.
Today if anyone preaches self-denial as a
condition of discipleship, you can hear the comments
afterward, old-fashioned, harsh, legalistic.
I dare say that our Lord would have
as much trouble finding acceptance among our preachers
as he had among the religious leaders of
his own day.
When Jesus preached the cross, when he said
take up your cross and follow me, he
was talking about denying your self-seekingness, denying
looking to yourself, to its needs, to its
wants, to its lusts, to its desires, to
its ambitions, to its plans, to its future,
to its past, to its present, and look
to him.
Let's read what A.W. Tozer said about
the cross.
The cross is the most revolutionary thing ever
to appear among men.
The cross of Roman times knew no compromise.
It never made concessions.
It won all its arguments by killing its
opponent and silencing him for good.
This is the Roman cross.
It spared not Christ, but slew him the
same as the rest, that's including thieves and
murderers.
He was alive when they hung him on
that cross and completely dead when they took
him off of it.
That was the cross the first time it
appeared in Christian history.
With perfect knowledge of all this, Christ said,
if any man will come after me, let
him deny himself, take up his cross and
follow me.
So the cross not only brought Christ's life
to an end, it also ends the first
life, the old life of every one of
his true followers.
This and nothing less is true Christianity.
We must do something about the cross, and
there's only one of two things we can
do.
Flee it.
That means run away from it or die
upon it.
Now when we preach the cross of Christ,
we're not supposed to just talk about the
cross that Jesus died on.
When we mention the cross, it's wonderful, it's
beautiful.
Yes, Jesus died on the cross, but we
need to understand because Jesus mentions about us
taking up our cross.
Now, if he hadn't said that, then we
could just tell about the death and life
and rebirth, the death and resurrection story without
even mentioning how it applies to us.
But Jesus took away our excuse for doing
that by mentioning we must take up a
cross.
And when Jesus mentioned that, when Jesus said
you must take up your cross, he was
talking to people who had a visual knowledge
of what the cross meant.
They had been to the Passover, they'd been
to Jerusalem, they had seen the Romans time
after time after time take religious zealots and
murderers and rapists and arsonists and nail them
to a cross.
And he saw them, just like Jesus, carry
their cross, being whipped and beaten out of
the city, being nailed to it, hung up
until they rotted there.
You know, Jesus only got taken down because
it was the night of the Sabbath.
Usually they left them out there.
They left them out there to have their
bones picked by birds.
They took them down because it was not
right, according to Jewish law, to keep a
man up on the Sabbath.
Now, when the disciples heard Jesus say you
must take up your cross, that must have
put a shutter down their spine because they
knew that everyone who took up their cross
in Jesus' day, for them it was a
one-way trip.
There was no coming back from that, taking
up your cross.
See, today we say take up your cross
while you think of that nice little silver
thing around your neck with a diamond in
it or a ruby or a piece of
turquoise, a piece of jewelry.
If Jesus would have died on the electric
chair, would you be wearing an electric chair
around your neck?
I don't think the cross is an appropriate
symbol of jewelry, personally.
Everybody's hiding their jewelry.
I don't know, you know.
I don't care what you wear as jewelry,
personally, but I'm saying that the cross needs
to be a symbol of death because that's
all it is.
It's not a symbol of resurrection.
It's a symbol of death.
It's a symbol, sure, of Jesus crossing out
our sins.
Sure, it's canceling out the debt.
Sure, it means that he crosses out the
old life.
But what it really means is death, death
to him and death to you.
And if you haven't heard that message, if
you haven't accepted it, embraced the cross, taken
it to heart and see that you need
to die and you need to deny yourself
and you need to take that one-way
trip carrying that big beam like Jesus did
and have everybody shudder because they know you're
not coming back unless you go through what
Jesus did, a resurrection, a new life.
And you don't have a resurrection before you
have a death on the cross.
Jesus didn't have a resurrection until he fully
died and was laid to rest.
We want to quickly pass over the cross.
Yes, yes, you have to die, but there's
a resurrection.
We want to present the resurrection.
Jesus didn't.
He suffered for 33 years on earth knowing
the day of his death.
You know that?
How would you like to know the day
of your death?
How would you like to walk around for
33 years knowing you're going to be beaten
and mutilated, not be able to get married,
not be able to enjoy any of the
things of this world that God created for
man and women to enjoy?
And you knew exactly that you were going
to have to die on that Passover on
your 33rd year.
I think he knew that.
Maybe not when he was two, but for
sure when he started his ministry, he knew
it.
He knew he had a limited time.