I want to share a story with you
today, friends, because it shows us how much
trouble we're really in.
I tried to join a Southern Baptist Church,
and it was peculiar in how they would
enter you into public membership.
If you wanted to join that church, you
had to submit to a three-hour new
member class taught by a staff minister.
Well, I signed up and showed up and
was seated in a banquet room with about
a hundred other people.
The staff minister greeted us and handed out
a booklet on the plan of salvation that
had fill-in-the-blank spaces.
First, he went around the room and asked
us about our church background.
There was quite a hodgepodge of church backgrounds
there.
As people said, they came from churches that
were Methodists and Lutheran and Baptist and Catholic.
Some were even unchurched completely.
Then the staff minister gave a long history
of his church and what they expected of
us in regard to baptism and serving and
tithing.
Then he had us open the plan of
salvation booklet, and he slowly read it to
us page by page and had us fill
in the blanks that were in each paragraph.
When we got through doing that, he gave
his personal testimony, how he got saved when
he was eight years old that he was
in a Baptist church.
He responded to the pastor's invitation to become
a Christian, how he walked the aisle and
accepted Jesus as his personal Savior.
As he told the story, his voice broke
and he shed some crocodile tears, as a
lot of evangelists tend to do.
He said he made his mother proud that
day.
I glanced around the room and the people
around me, believe it or not, had tears
in their eyes.
That's why TV shows use canned laughter, because
human emotion often follows imitation.
Then he made the following statement.
He said, our church will not allow membership
unless you have accepted Jesus as your personal
Savior.
And if there are some of you here
today who would like to accept Jesus right
now, I'm going to give you that opportunity.
And he asked us to close our eyes
and bow our heads and raise our hand
if we wanted to accept Jesus.
Everybody closed their eyes except me.
I looked around the room in startlement as
I saw hands go up all around the
room.
Then he closed in a prayer and welcomed
us to his church.
Well, I never went back to that church
again, because on the drive home, I felt
nauseous and mad at the same time.
It sickened me and angered me that our
modern churches have so cheapened the gospel to
reduce it to a few steps of a
physical act, while at the same time playing
with people's emotions.
A dead room full of people were now
convinced they were Christians because they did what
the minister told them to do.
They filled out a booklet.
They got a little teary-eyed.
They raised their hand to accept Jesus as
their personal Savior.
The whole thing made me sick to my
stomach, and it still bothers me to think
about how those deceived individuals will one day
die and drop into hell one by one,
like everybody else who mistook church membership for
salvation.
None of that man-centered denominational nonsense is
even in my Bible.
Jesus didn't tell Nicodemus to close his eyes
and raise his hand if he wanted to
accept him as his personal Savior.
Rather, he told him, Accept a man, be
born again.
He cannot see the kingdom of God.
A person gets saved when they are born
from above and washed into blood.
We must have a new nature, new principles,
new affections, new aims.
By our first birth, we are corrupt, shaped
in sin and iniquity.
We must undergo a second birth and regeneration,
where God performs a supernatural act of grace
upon our heart.
But those deceived individuals in that room that
day were given a false assurance of heaven
by church membership, but they never had been
awakened to their lost condition.
They never had come under Holy Ghost conviction.
We were yet strangers to God's demand for
repentance and His necessity of regeneration upon the
heart.
They were not told that salvation avows the
fact that sin and all the occasions of
it must be forsaken, that we must cast
away and throw down every beloved idol from
our heart, that following Christ meant to renounce
ourselves as we're bought with a price, and
that price is His blood that God required
of them to use themselves and everything else
for Him and His glory.
Their strength, their substance, and their influence should
be God-centered.
And from that point forward, their time was
not their own.
Their money was not their own.
Their body was not their own.
Christ must be a complete master.
That Jesus said, if any man will come
after me, let him deny himself and take
up his cross and follow me.
No.
Instead, they were given instructions to close their
eyes and raise their hand if they wanted
to accept Jesus.
What they didn't realize was they raised their
hand for hell.