Six different messages on counterfeit conversion, or study,
really, of conversion.
And we have looked so far at what
kind of ground?
First kind of ground we looked at?
Wayside ground, and we said that represented what
kind of faith?
A legal faith as opposed to gospel faith,
characteristics of legal?
Selfishness, and its parameters?
Reward and punishment, or threat and bribe.
In contrast to that, gospel faith?
Love and trust, and it requires a giving
up of a self-centeredness.
And we are, if we are being morally
ruled at all, we are in one of
those two kingdoms.
A kingdom of legal obedience, which says a
bare minimum of morality, but is not the
gospel.
Or a true gospel submission, where you consider
two sons, identical twins in the same family.
One, you'll see in that little study sheet
I gave you, one who loves his dad,
and trusts him, and does what his dad
asks him to do, simply on that basis.
The other son, who fears that he might
be cut out of the dad's inheritance, if
he doesn't do what he says, and tries
to butter up his dad, so make sure
he'll stay in his good books.
Now, both of them may do identical things,
they may live in the same house, they
may carry out identical work programs, or all
this different thing, but there is a total
difference in their attitudes, and God does not
want the forced obedience of mere slaves.
He wants the love and the trust of
sons and daughters, and that is the gospel.
Second kind of soil we looked at.
The rocky soil, and remember what happened with
this?
It sprung up, and then the sun came
out, and withered away the plant.
We looked briefly at what the sun represented.
Could you tell us biblically what those three
or four things were?
Yes.
Temptation was one, tribulation another, affliction or persecution.
Sometimes those words are used interchangeably in the
New Testament, but that gives you the broad
spectrum of the things.
What does the sun do to a normal
healthy plant whose roots go down?
Helps it grow.
We then made a stab at guessing what
these hard rocks may represent parabolically.
What did we come up with?
They are unyielded things, something down there that
will not yield.
Ground is yielding, but rock is not.
One of the major things, at least in
this culture, is not bad things, not deep
down hidden bad things, but deep down hidden
good things.
The hardest kind of things to break are
good things.
It is much easier, for instance, to resist
the temptation of an enemy.
If you are called to a mission field,
for instance, and God gives you this call,
and an enemy comes up and says, You
go to the mission field, boy, and you
watch out.
There is a real threat on your life.
You go.
But what if a friend comes, somebody dear
and close, and says, If you go to
the mission field, you break my heart.
That is a different story, a much more
difficult thing to handle.
There are many young people who would have
obeyed God's call, but a good thing got
in the way, a good career, a good
relationship, a nice thing, a right, not a
wrong, that got in the way of God.
Now, today, we look at probably the hairiest
one of all of these things.
This is the third kind of soil.
We have already looked at the birds and
the monolith monsters, or the day the earth
caught fire, I suppose we could call the
other one too.
We want to look at the third one
now, and we'll call this the day of
the Triffids.
Triffids were a creation of John Wyndham, some
plants that landed on earth from Mars or
something.
It's always coming from outer space.
They never come from inner space.
Here is the story.
Can somebody read out that particular passage for
us?
Mark will do.
Okay, it's a very simple statement.
Some fell among thorns.
So here's the seed.
Is this ground capable of supporting healthy plant
life?
Yes, it is.
I mean, you know, there's a lot of
healthy plants there, but unfortunately, some are not
nice.
So this plant goes in its roots.
Instead of going outward, go down.
That's a good sign.
It doesn't shoot up as fast as the
other one.
The seed buried under there, and it's growing.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of
rocks down there.
The plant goes up.
Just like the previous one, it looks like
it's going to be a good deal.
Unfortunately, it's the
day of the Triffids.
These Triffids, of course, in Wyndham's thing were
plants that killed you.
You know, they walk around, click, click, and
making funny noises.
Here we have sort of the divine equivalent
of that.
A plant that starts off well, but is
choked out or killed by other plants that
are planted right beside it.
So here we have a garden that is
the soil in which it's healthy, but there's
been no care.
There's been no weeding in this thing, and
those weeds choke out what otherwise would be
a great life, a great witness, a great
ministry, or something, a great Christianity.
Now, we're going to look briefly at what
the Scripture speaks about, these things and weeds,
but can we take it a block at
a time?
I want to give you the problem first.
We are basically looking at those five different
things Benjamin Keats talked about, one of them
being perhaps the failure to properly prepare the
soil, or an analysis of the kind of
reasons why some people don't make it.
But I'll never forget this.
In New Zealand, in a church, an orthodox,
fundamentally evangelical church, a young lady came up
to a deacon in the church who had
just become a Christian.
She'd been saved about two weeks.
And the deacon said to her, How is
it with your soul, or words to that
effect?
That's even how he talked.
How is it with your soul?
She said, Oh, it's so exciting.
She said, I'm so happy I can hardly
sleep.
And he said, Don't worry, you'll soon get
over it.
Now, that has to be a double tragedy.
Number one, that a man who's supposed to
be a deacon, an elder in a church,
who'd say a thing to a precious young
child of God like that, and damp...
You know, if you had a choice between
damping two enthusiastic people and trying to stir
up two dead people, which one would you
pick?
It's easier to cool down a fanatic than
revive a corpse, isn't it?
And I don't think our real problem today
is cooling down fanaticism.
That's what Tozer talked about.
That's like sort of trying to keep the
inhabitants of a graveyard from making merry.
You know, they...
That just doesn't happen in a huge chunk
of time.
Our problem is to get dead people to
live, which is a much more difficult problem
than cooling down somebody who should be a
little quieter.
But the second part of this tragedy is
that all too often it should be true,
that you get over it, that in the
words of Scripture you lose your first love,
that something happens to you and you get
choked out somewhere along the way.
Now, it is no secret.
One man wrote that many Christians are about
as effective for God as the Navy was
for the United States 15 minutes after Pearl
Harbor.
And we're going to look just briefly at
this first thing, at the signs, biblical signs,
of what these weeds may be.
Can you give me in order, first, in
Jesus' explanation, Matthew 13, 22, Mark 4, 18,
and Luke 8, 14, what he amplifies as
the substance of this parable?
Can you give me, first of all, the
first characteristic of this soil?
They hear the word.
And for a third time, we are not
dealing with irreligious people.
Next.
Now, can you look at Luke 8, 14?
There is an interesting little addition.
That's one of the scariest little additions I've...
additions, not e-ditions, additions, amplifications.
The way to really, I think, to get
the full meat of anything that Jesus says
in these parables is to do what...
we've called it interweave analysis.
You take the synoptic gospels and you can...
instead of just putting them in parallel columns,
you actually weave.
It's better to do it in Greek, but
English is fine, too.
You take the different phrases, and where there's
a duplication of a phrase, like when the
word and appears three times, you just drop
one of them, or drop two of them,
and keep the other and.
And you just keep them in chronological order,
and then you get a full, detailed statement,
which I think represents the whole thing of
what Jesus said, in which each gospel picks
up from their own perspective and gives you
most of it, or sections of it, and
to read the whole thing gives you sometimes
additional insight.
Now, Luke, who is...
shows us Christ as man, and with all
his humanity, and shows us him also as
the frailties of Christ.
You see the times he had to pray
when he's thirsty, and Luke's a teacher's gospel,
too, and it amplifies a great deal of
the inner life of Christ.
Now, he puts in one little two-word
phrase.
Can you find that phrase?
Just before the rest of it.
He goes forth.
Now, that is a very scary phrase.
You know why it's a scary phrase?
Because it's the same kind of phrase that's
used for missions.
Go out, go forth, go into...
It's a sending phrase.
I send you forth as lambs among wolves.
It's a ministry type of phrase.
It's not one of just being there and
stuff like that.
It almost implies like this person is actually
involved in some kind of work of ministry
when this thing happens.
And so I want to introduce you in
this session to the third and maybe the
scariest of all of these things.
And that is the person who not only
starts and appears to grow well, but actually
begins to duplicate or replicate or in some
way have some kind of public ministry and
then falls apart and then gets choked out
and then gets destroyed.
So let's list now what the sculpture represents
these weeds as being.
Can you give me a list of these
things now?
First, the worries or the cares of what?
Of this world.
Implying there's another one.
Which you ought to care about.
Second, yeah, now Matthew puts in and Mark
puts in the what?
The deceitfulness of riches.
So something that riches can do.
What did we say was the chief sign
of the last days?
Deception, religious deception.
So here's that word appearing again in context
with economics.
Now, does being poor make you godly?
No, it does not.
It's an old song.
I dreamt of the great judgment morning and
it says the poor man was there, the
rich man was there, but his riches had
melted and vanished away.
The poor man was there with his burdens.
His debts were too heavy to pay.
So we're not Marxists.
It's not your economics that determine your future.
But there's a difference apparently between riches and
wealth.
The Bible says if riches increase, do not
set your heart upon them.
And it's the love of money that is
the root of all evil.
I'm going to give you some very tragic,
practical examples.
I won't mention any names of people, but
I think you could pretty much fill in
the blanks for yourself in many, many circumstances
of what happens in the Western world in
this situation.
And a third one.
Yeah, the desires.
King James had a good old strong word,
the lusts of other things.
That strong desire, the epithermia.
The word epithermia, the strong desire, is not
a bad word in itself.
Some people think, you know, that it's the
strength of a feeling that makes something right
or wrong, but it isn't.
If you had a strong desire for money,
does that mean you're wrong?
Not necessarily.
Let's say, you know, there were 100,000
people starving to death and you needed a
million dollars to feed them and to take
care of them straight away.
You could have an intense desire for money
and I'd be wrong.
Not the intensity of desire.
If you hadn't eaten for 48 days and
you had an intense desire for food, that's
different from gluttony.
Okay?
So, George McDonald said a neat thing about
things, and you might like to write this
down because it's the simplest, most profound thing
I've ever heard on our relationship to the
material world.
He said, if it be things that slay
you, if it be things that slay you,
that kill you, that put you to death,
if it be things that slay you, what
matter things you have, what matter things you
have or things you have not?
In other words, you can be poor, you
can be rich and still be slain by
things.
Be poor and wanting things, be rich and
having things, and things are your problem.
The love of things, the desire for things,
the rulership of things.
And there is an end to this.
One says, it chokes the word and he
becomes unfruitful.
Another one says, it chokes the word and
it becomes unfruitful.
And the last one, Luke again adds an
extra little thing, brings forth no fruit to
maturity or to perfection.
So there's no fruit.
Nipped in the bud is what we would
say colloquially.
Now, I want to read to you now
some more clips.
Some of you have read this book.
If not, it's well worth reading.
You don't have to read the last chapter
if you like.
I don't read it very often.
But the analysis is great.
I don't know whether the solution is as
profound as it could be, but the analysis
is accurate.
This is Walter Chantry's little book, Today's Gospel,
Authentic or Synthetic.
And here's a pastor with his heart in
the right place who is concerned about what
is happening in evangelical Christianity today.
And what interests me is this.
This call for cleaning up the Christian church
is coming from all sides of the Christian
church.
It's coming from the Calvinist side.
It's coming from the Armenians.
It's coming from the mystics.
It's coming from the reformers.
It's coming from every side of the Christian
church.
And it's saying, we have departed from the
content of the gospel.
We are not preaching what we should be
preaching.
And what's interesting, though the answers are different,
the reformers go, we need to return to
the days of Calvin and Luther.
And they go, yay.
And all the Armenians go, what about John
Wesley and those guys?
Don't leave them.
So there's that still going on.
But the analysis is the same.
They all say, this is a problem.
This is what needs to be done.
So I want to read you a couple
of little bits here from Chantry.
He first talks about how the church is
astir with questions about evangelism and hope for
revival.
Never have there been more missionaries.
Never have there been more evangelistic campaigns.
Never more Christians studying to do personal evangelism.
Never such enormous conferences to examine seriously the
cause and cure of lameness in the gospel
ministry.
Then he mentions thousands of people of a
hundred nations all met for evangelism conferences.
And yet, after all this analysis, evaluating, praying
and hoping, missions are not in great store
being revitalized and sinners not turning to Christ
in great numbers.
And we have to take this with a
pinch of salt because we're talking about the
Western world and the average evangelical fundamental church
in this nation.
There are some exceptions, thank God.
And then, he goes on and he says
this.
The central issue of the way of salvation,
large segments of Protestantism are engrossed in neo
-traditionalism.
We have inherited a system of evangelistic preaching
which is unbiblical.
Nor is this tradition very ancient.
Our messages and manner of preaching the gospel
cannot be traced back to the Reformers and
their creeds.
They are much more recent innovations.
They have clearly arisen from superficial exegesis and
a careless mixture of 20th century reason with
God's revelation.
Products of modern evangelism are often sad examples
of Christianity.
They make a profession of faith and then
continue to live like the world.
Decisions for Christ mean very little.
Only a small proportion of those who make
decisions, quote unquote, evidence the grace of God
and a transformed life.
All this related to the use of a
message in evangelism that is unbiblical.
The truth necessary for life has been hidden
in a smokescreen of human inventions.
On the shallow ground of man's logic, large
numbers have been led to assume they have
a right to everlasting life and have been
given an assurance which does not belong to
them.
Evangelicals are swelling the ranks of the deluded
with a perverted gospel.
And then he goes on talking about those
who read these pages and he says, Could
you be misleading souls and misdirecting the labor
of other Christians?
Have you closely examined your message and methods
in the light of God's word?
Pastors, this is no idle question.
Have you not wondered about those converts who
are as carnal as ever?
What about those who have decided for Christ
and you can't tell what they've decided?
They're not godly like the Savior they profess,
nor zealous for his cause.
They do not study the word and do
not mind if they're absent when it is
preached.
Consequently, you know, they give no evidence of
true conversion.
Have you considered the possibility they were never
evangelized at all?
And then goes into a number of areas
like repentance and preaching the law of God
to shut people up to conviction of sin
and a number of these well documented.
You can go back in the stream of
the Christian church ever since evangelism has been
preached right back to the Old Testament.
Say, types of how to preach, it's all
in there.
For instance, let me give you just a
little simple visual example.
I have here a cheetah's Bible.
I mean, that's not what it's called.
It's called a Zondervan Marked Reference.
And I like this thing because it's got
a nice concordance in the back and stuff.
But it's already pre-marked.
That impresses people no end when you open
it up and there's all these lovely colored
scribbles all over the thing.
And that's been pre-marked for you.
It was done by a guy called G.
Gilchrist Lawson who put out the little Personal
Workers New Testament with a red letter thing,
you know.
What he did is he did a whole
Bible, kind of the product of his life's
work in which he took the major themes
of the Bible, broke them all down according
to the weight that was given to them
in Scripture.
And he explains his method somewhere here if
I can find it.
I look at this about once every eight
years.
No, I can't find it.
It's in here somewhere.
Out of a total of 31,102 verses
in the Bible, imagine counting them, 7,670
verses or nearly one verse and four can
say of salvation.
This includes over 1,900 verses on the
necessity of holy living, 2,531 verses on
the temporal punishment of the wicked.
What happens right here and now, not future.
See?
413 verses on the future punishment of the
wicked, 575 verses which shows God's love for
the sinner and 182 verses which show God
is no respecter of persons.
Out of 23,145 verses in the Old
Testament, 4,736 have some bearing on man's
need of salvation or the way of salvation.
And 2,934 verses out of a total
of 7,957 in the New Testament also
concerning the salvation of mankind.
So, what I want to do is just
show you a couple of little blocks of
stuff here.
The first one is a subject which is
very popular today and is well preached on
and that is that faith is central to
conversion.
Now, around my fingers there are all the
verses in the Bible on faith is the
condition of conversion.
All right?
By faith, we are saved.
I've got my two fingers around them.
Now, most of you, how many of you
have ever heard a sermon on faith?
Put your hands up.
I'd imagine most of you have.
I'm going to turn the page here and
I want to show you the Bible verses
on repentance.
There's at least twice as many verses on
repentance.
But, what is this one down here?
What is this with a page and over
the page?
Holy living should follow conversion.
That's what it's about.
There is more space given to this than
almost any other theme concerning salvation.
Now, let me ask you a question.
I wonder if you can guess what this
question is.
What do you think we're preaching today in
balance?
We talk about balance.
This isn't balance.
This is tremendous emphasis on one side of
the thing.
And I think we ought to get from
even a cursory glance at this block of
stuff that God expects people who follow him
to be like him.
And if they're not, there's a real problem
either in their understanding or in their actual
meeting him.
And that, I think, is that what Dave
Wilkerson's recently called a revival of holiness.
There is a cry going out across the
country for return to ordinary Christianity, not super
spiritual Christianity, just ordinary Christianity.
Our Christianity is subnormal.
We have become subcultures of the original Christians.
We are no...
To us, advanced, heavy-duty Christianity is not
even kindergarten stuff.
We are so low we have to reach
up to the touch bottom.
Now, you could pick this up from any
writer.
I've got stacks of different people through the
past.
Here is A.W. Towson, what it means
to accept Christ, he says.
A few things, fortunately, only a few are
matters of life and death, such as a
compass for a sea voyage or a guide
for a journey across the desert.
To ignore these vital things is not to
gamble or take a chance.
It is to commit suicide.
Here it is either be right or be
dead.
To the question, what must I do to
be saved, we must learn the correct answer.
To fail here is not to gamble with
our souls.
It is to guarantee eternal banishment from the
face of God.
Here we must be right or we will
be finally lost.
Being spiritually lazy, we naturally tend to gravitate
towards the easiest way of settling our religious
questions.
Hence the formula, Accept Christ, has become a
panacea of universal application and I believe it
has been fatal to many.
Trouble is the whole Accept Christ attitude is
likely to be wrong.
It shows Christ applying to us rather than
us to him.
It makes him stand hat in hand awaiting
our verdict on him, instead of kneeling with
troubled hearts awaiting his verdict on us.
It may even permit us to accept Christ
by an impulsive mind or emotions painlessly at
no cost, lost to our ego and no
inconvenience to our usual way of life.
I must be frank in my feeling that
a notable heresy has come into being in
the Evangelical circles.
The widely accepted concept that we humans can
choose to accept Christ only because we need
him as Savior and that we have a
right to postpone our obedience to him as
Lord as long as we want to.
And then he goes on.
That's Posen.
And we could pick up the same theme
from people like Catherine Booth.
Here's Catherine Booth's popular Christianity.
Another modern representation of Christ is that of
a substitutionary Savior, not in a sense of
atonement, but in the way of obedience.
This Christ is held up as embodying in
himself the sum and substance of the sin
of salvation, needing only to believe in that
as accepted by the mind as the atoning
sacrifice and trusted in a securing for the
sinner all the benefits involved in his death
without respect to any inward change in the
sinner himself.
This Christ is held up as a justification
and protection in sin, not a deliverer from
sin.
In other words, men are taught Christ obeyed
the law for them, but he is placed
as obedience in the stead of or as
substitution of the sinner's own obedience or sanctification,
which is in effect like saying, though you
may be untrue, Christ is your truth.
Though you may be unclean, Christ is your
chastity.
Though you may be dishonest, Christ is your
honesty.
Though you may be insincere, Christ is your
sincerity.
The Christ of God never undertook to perform
any such offices for his people, but he
did undertake to make them new creatures and
thus to enable them to perform this.
He never undertook to be true instead of
me, but to make me true to the
very core of my soul.
He never undertook to make me pass for
pure, either to God or to men, but
to enable me to be pure.
He never undertook to make me pass for
honest or sincere, but to renew me in
the spirit of my mind, so I could
not help but be both as a result
of the operation of his Holy Spirit in
me.
He never undertook to love God instead of
my doing so with all my heart and
mind and soul and strength, but he came
on purpose to empower and inspire me to
do this.
The idea of a substitutionary Christ accepted as
an outward covering instead of the power of
an endless life is a cheat of the
devil and has been the ruin of thousands
of souls.
I fear this view of Christ, so persistently
preached in the present day, encourages thousands to
live in a false hope while they are
living in sin.
Now, somebody asked a question about eternal security
and one of our question answer things.
I believe in eternal security.
I do not believe in carnal security.
A person living a life unlike Jesus and
no heart's desire to be like him, is
still saved.
Saved from what?
Certainly not from sin.
And that's what Jesus came to do that
nobody else can do.
He is the only one who can deliver
from sin.
Now, we could go through chunks of this
stuff and you can go to the Puritan
writers or the pilgrims or the mystics or
the evangelicals or the reformers or the modern
evangelical fundamentalists have made a jump in the
last fifty, sixty, eighty years.
There's been a decay from that original preaching
of, we'll call it no saviourhood without lordship.
You know what they preach in Behind the
Iron Curtain?
No saviourhood without lordship.
They never heard of a division of a
thing.
You get saved, that's it, Jesus is your
boss.
Before the Kremlin was, now Jesus is.
That's it.
And some of the third, other third world
countries, in Africa, Latin America, they, if you
said, well, you've made Jesus your saviour, have
you made him your lord?
They wouldn't know what in a fact you
were talking about.
You see, you know, it's not what Jesus
does, it's who he is.
It's like me saying, I accept my wife
as my personal dishwasher.
It's who he is, not what he does.
That's secondary to who he is.
And he is first and foremost.
He's lord 747 times in the New Testament.
And wherever that phrase, saviour, lord and saviour,
it's always in that order.
Lord and saviour.
It's never flipped.
Lord and Christ.
Lord and saviour.
And that's not what Jesus does.
it's
who he is.
That voice looks weird to me, so I'm
just going to put you in it.
All right?
Now, if you make a separation between lord
and saviour, then you're going to have some
funny people.
And this is the way they look.
They're Christians, but they're hookers.
Still.
Because they haven't given that area to the
lordship of Christ yet.
They're Christians, but they're still addicts.
They're Christians, but they're still, you fill in
the blanks.
They're Christians, but they're still demon-possessed.
They're Christians, but they're still, fill in the
blanks.
You can put all kinds of things in
between this, and you need to put it
in to explain an anomaly of a person
who is a Christian, but still living exactly
like their non-Christian neighbours.
And what you put in there just depends
on whatever's in the particular year you speak
at.
You see?
You could put discipleship in here.
You could put baptism of the spirit.
You could put deliverance.
You can put, you know, fill in the
blanks, whatever.
And on our, there is a sense in
which we must go.
Right?
I mean, how many of you have gone
in the last year?
Or last hour?
Or the last?
Now, let me give you a little distinction
here that has been of value to me.
It has to do with an electronics analogy.
There are two kinds of circuits in electronics.
One's called digital.
One's called analogue.
An analogue circuit is a little bit like
a dimmer on a light.
If you're looking at it on a graph,
it would go up slowly like that.
It's like a light dimmer or a volume
controller on a radio, like this.
Ah!
See that?
A little bit at a time.
Like this, see?
Digital, though, on a scope, would look like
that.
It's either on or it's off.
It's up, it's down.
Nothing in between.
It's just like that.
Like a light switch.
It's not sort of part on and part,
and it's off.
See?
Just like that.
Now, these are computer-type circuits and these
are linear sound-type circuits and stuff like
that.
All right?
Now, growth in Christian things is growth in
grace, response, obedience to God's grace.
That's one thing.
And then, growth also in wisdom.
In our learning, ah, let's change this one
to obey.
All right?
Those are two things.
Growth in response to God as He gives
us His royal commands and then learning what
that thing is.
Now, here is what the Christian life looks
like then.
One of these components, these two things, to
be loving and to be wise is essentially
what it means to be holy.
God is light.
God is love.
Two essential elements of a holy life.
Wisdom and love.
Those two things.
And out of all of those things flows
all of God's actions.
His mercy, His judgment, all of those things
flow from His holiness, His wisdom and His
love implemented by His power.
Okay?
Now, growth in the Christian life then is
growth in two different things, but this is
the way it happens.
Analog growth is growth in wisdom.
That's called line on line, precept on precept.
That's the way God teaches you.
He gives you one little thing and then
the next little thing and the next little
thing.
He doesn't just go ba-boom and dump
everything on you.
He gives you line on line.
See?
Takes you like a little kid and gives
you one thing and then the next thing.
But obedience is digital.
Obedience is yes or no.
It is not maybe.
And what we have done in our day
is made not only learning analog but obedience
analog.
So a person is a little bit more
obedient than they were yesterday, which is like
being sort of God is light and in
Him there is no darkness at all except.
And that is, what that does is it
cuts out the absolutes in the Christian life,
see?
It, it, uh, Mario Morello calls it we
are ish, it's, it's ishness.
We praise ish, we worship ish, we obey
ish.
You say to a person, are you serving
the Lord?
Well, more or less ish.
And what does that mean?
If I say to a girl, are you
pregnant?
Well, more or less ish.
What does that mean?
She's either is or she's not.
You married?
Well, kind of more or less.
Those are two biblical illustrations of conversion.
Birth and marriage.
And there, you know, yes or no.
It's not a sort of mm-hmm, maybe.
And we made it a maybe.
And that's one of the most dangerous things
you can do.
And we're not trying to hold up some
kind of legal standard here.
I'm just trying to hold up some standard
at all.
If we're going to preach the gospel and
hold a standard up, you're going to hold
your Mickey Mouse one up or his.
We're going to say, look, this is as
good as I've ever got, so why don't
you try and be like this?
Then we're back on that last ground.
Compare ourselves with ourselves.
I would rather hold a standard up that
I can't make that God tells me is
His standard, than to hold up a standard
I can easily do and make that.
It's an embarrassing thing to stand before God
and say, well, I passed on my standards.
You see what I'm talking about?
If we don't have, matter of fact, Victor
Frankl said that we need something bigger than
ourselves to give ourselves to to be healthy.
You're not mentally healthy if you don't have
something bigger than yourself to give yourself to.
That's why a person will work for a
firm, they'll retire him at 60 years old,
give him a gold watch, and he goes
home and he's dead in two weeks because
he lost his gold.
He had nothing left to give himself to,
so he just lay down and died.
Now, if we have an infinite God, and
we do, and we're finite beings, and we
are, and he says, you be holy, for
I am holy, or be perfect, even as
your Heavenly Father is perfect, then where are
you going to come to the end of
that?
When are you going to have time to
be laid back and mellow?
When will you arrive?
Here I am, I have arrived.
Listen, who saved the Apostle Paul?
Did he do a good job?
Did he have the proper counseling?
I would imagine so.
Would you not?
To be saved by Christ himself?
Do you think the Apostle Paul knew Jesus?
Would you think?
It doesn't take more than three brain cells
to say, well, yes, he probably did.
Then why in the world does Paul, at
the end of his life, say that I
might know him?
Because he understood this.
Okay?
We sin against God when we make obedience
analog.
And tell people you can obey a little
bit more than you did before.
You obey or you disobey.
We reject what God says, we're not partially
obedient.
The myth of partial obedience has eaten out
the heart of the church.
The myth of partial obedience.
Here's God, he speaks to Jonah, arise and
go to Nineveh.
So Jonah does something, he arises, dynamite, and
he goes to Tarshish.
He would have said, well, I do most
of what you say.
God arranged a small voyage in a fish?
All right, now, I'm going to give you
some things.
How much like a Christian can a non
-Christian be?
That's a big question.
How much like a Christian can a non
-Christian be?
How moral can a lost man be?
The Bible answers exceedingly so.
God looks at the heart, men look at
the outward appearance.
Now, Matthew 23, 28.
You can be outwardly spotless.
Matthew 23, 28.
Remember when Keith and I were in Australia
some years ago?
We went out to eat after one of
his concerts, and it was kind of late
at night, about 12 or 1.
We went to this little pancake house type
place, and there was a girl who served
us, and she looked like a charismatic Christian.
I mean, she smiled and brought all this
stuff, and she was nice and kind, you
know, she didn't have a wart on her
nose, she didn't fly in on a broomstick
or anything.
She was very nice.
She kind of looked like a Christian would
look, right?
The one you expect So, Keith talking to
me, you know, we're talking about early, first
young Christians, how easy it is sometimes to
witness before you learn all the dangers of
what you ought not to do, and then
don't do anything.
And Keith was talking about how in the
early days, he could witness easily to waitresses,
and Keith being, of course, tactful as you
know he is, and always very careful to
say the right thing.
This waitress comes back, and Keith in illustration,
he's saying, you know, I used to witness
to waitress just like this, boom, and then
he turns around to this girl who's bringing
us their butter pancakes or whatever, and he
says, excuse me, do you know Jesus?
Right, you know, this kind of delicate, subtle
approach to the gospel.
And she looks at him in the strangest
way, like, like this, and said, no, I
wouldn't want to know him, which shocked Keith.
I mean, he nearly dropped his pancake.
He was so, you know, he didn't expect
anything except that, sort of in person brush,
well, no, you know, well, but not, no,
I wouldn't want to know him.
I mean, not that, not from this nice,
you know, charismatic Christian looking girl.
And Keith went, oh, oh, oh, why not?
Well, it works to that effect, and she
said, you're a Christian, are you?
He said, yes.
She said, you wouldn't understand.
Put the pancakes down and left.
So, keep thinking, you know, what is this?
So eventually, you know, she comes back for
the check or whatever the thing is, and
Keith nails her again, you know, what are
you into, he says, you know.
She says, the reason why I wouldn't want
to give my life to Jesus is because
I love the devil.
He is my master and my Lord, and
he helps me in everything I do, and
I worship him, and he is, he's the
one, the only one I'd ever serve and
give my life to.
And then Keith nearly regurgitated his butter pancakes,
because that is a total shock.
You expect, you know, this person's a, they
come in looking like Rosemary's baby, you know,
with claws as they put the, you know,
the broom packed there, and as they leave,
some of the most demonic people I've ever
met in my life are the most outwardly
beautiful.
One young girl, the devil promised her that
if she married him, she would become secretary
of the next president, and he would give
her power in the land.
All these trippy things.
He's a liar, of course.
But boy, she was on her way up
there.
She had a memory.
She could pick something up and look at
it and never forget it.
Just like this, you know.
Unbelievable.
And the most nice-looking girl you ever
saw.
And she was married to the devil.
It's not outwardly spotless.
They'd be Pharisees.
You know who the Pharisees were?
We think of them as sort of a
bunch of Freddy Pharisee and saying religious things.
These guys were the spotless ones, boy.
They were the heavy-duty dudes.
They were the top evangelical fundamentalists of their
day.
It's like saying, see Billy Graham, unless your
righteousness exceeds his, you're going to go to
hell.
And you think, well, Billy Graham, he doesn't
make it.
Nobody's going to make it.
That was the same kind of effect Jesus
had.
You know, we're not saying Billy Graham is
actually a revening wolf inside.
He's a godly man.
I'm talking about, can you imagine the shock
it would be for you to look up
to your top religious leaders and have God
say, forget it.
Motives are wrong.
Their outsides are nice.
Their insides are rotten.
Next, you can be prayerful.
Mark 12, 40.
We think that if you really pray a
lot, you must be saved.
Jesus said, you ask and you receive not.
He didn't say, you didn't ask.
He said, you ask and you receive not,
in the book of James, because you ask
and miss, that you may spend it on
your own lusts, in effect.
Now, the Pharisees prayed five times a day.
Jesus said, beware the scribes, which for pretense
make long prayers.
They shall receive greater damnation.
You can be zealous in religion.
Zeal is not a test of genuine Christianity.
Some of the most zealous people in the
world are not saved at all.
They're deeply into what they are into.
You know, you can get hit up for
flowers or cookies or stuff by the most
zealous people.
They're door to door.
Hello, we're from the First Church of Iowa.
We want to tell you about the heaviest
thing that's ever come down the pike.
I went to Israel many years ago.
I saw Masada there.
My wife actually went out in the desert
and sunlight came up and stood there.
Where today, the Israelis go when the tank
battalions are getting ready for their graduation service.
And they stand there as a little bit
like the Alamo.
Masada is a place where just a handful
of Jewish zealots, rather than Baba, the Roman
Empire, and to give up their devotion to
their tradition.
They all lay down and they died.
They killed themselves.
Five handpicked people went through and put to
death by their consent and choice.
Every man, woman, and child in the place.
And then they lay down beside their wives
and children and fell on their own swords.
And when the Romans finally broke in, I
hear Mr. Spock, I'm coming in.
When the Romans finally broke in, a day
later, they had this eerie thing.
All the food heaped up and spoiled.
All the weapons destroyed and just a pile
of corpses.
They died rather than betray the smallest diode
of their religion.
Were they Christian?
No.
Did they really know God?
No, but they were deeply devoted to a
religious tradition, enough to lay their lives down
for Him.
Jonestown is another example.
You do not have to be a Christian
to be zealous.
Not at all.
You can be conscientious in spiritual duties.
You can know and read the Bible.
Now, you talk about knowing and reading the
Bible.
If we took the Pharisees as an example,
you wouldn't believe how heavy they were.
To get to be an ordinary scribe, which
was the lowest on the totem pole, you
copied out by hand the Scriptures and you
memorized them.
How many of you have memorized the Bible?
They did, plus great chunks of the Torah
and everything else.
Now it's just to be a scribe.
To be a lawyer, you had to not
only know it, you had to be able
to interpret it.
But to be a Pharisee, you had to
not only know it and interpret it correctly,
you had to live it perfectly.
Then you could be a Pharisee.
And it was these people that Jesus said,
you're not going to make it.
Now, can you imagine the shock that is?
You can go to church.
You can enjoy going to services.
You can like speakers that love God and
not be a Christian.
Ezekiel 33, an Old Testament example of this,
God said this to Ezekiel, Son of man,
the children of your people talk about you
one to another and say, Come, I hear.
Come, I pray you and listen to the
word that comes from the mouth of the
Lord.
And people gathering before Ezekiel and there's word
of mouth saying, hey, listen, this is heavy,
boy.
This guy's speaking a real word from God.
And he said, they sit before you as
my people, but you are one to them
that has a lovely voice and knows how
to play well on an instrument.
They hear your words and they will not
do them.
With their mouth, they show much love, but
their heart goes after their own covetousness.
God said they like it, but they just
like, they like the things you're saying.
Hey, wasn't that a heavy message?
But they're not changed.
Their heart is no different.
They like going to services.
They like listening to Christians, but they're not
themselves.
You can be active in witnessing.
Matthew 23, 15.
And in YWAM we know this.
All across the world, there are people who
had signed up for missions activities who on
the mission field got saved.
Just like John Wesley.
Remember?
Went out to convert the heathen and, oh,
who will convert me?
How many kids?
Best recommended out of all pastors of the
Zod, greatest young person, very zealous, keen, goes
there.
Three months into the missions program, he goes,
I'm a Christian, and gets saved.
See?
Happens all over the place.
Here's what Jesus said.
Matthew 23, 15.
Well unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, you
cross land and sea to win one follower,
and when you have him, you make him
twice the child of hell that you are.
Now, isn't that a heavy thing for witnessing?
All right.
Let's take a break.
Why don't we have a break?