Spiritual Transition from Silver Metal

do it. All right, well, welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academies. This is part of the live show.

Those who watch live, Monday nights 8 o 'clock at strivingforeternity .org.

Go to the academy, go watch live, and you can see it live Monday nights Eastern Standard Time. But it is the time where people give me something they think

I just cannot possibly transition from to the gospel. This is a game that we play because the more that we practice to transition from whatever happens around us to the gospel, we no longer need to pray,

Lord, give us an opportunity to share the gospel. We can make gospel conversations from anything that happens around us.

The more you practice this, the better you're going to be at it. It's a game you could play at a youth group or when adults are around, just throw out an object, throw out a thing and say, hey, transition to the gospel, transition to a spiritual message.

And each of you are going to have different ideas how you're going to do that. I have tonight, I have to check because I scrolled off the screen.

Tonight I have to transition from a piece of silver, the metal, to the gospel.

So a piece of silver. Do you think you'd be able to transition from a piece of silver to the gospel?

I would transition actually this way. This probably wouldn't be the way I typically do it, but just because this is what is on my mind today because I happened to see this

YouTube video pretty recently of a guy having a bar of silver and he had a stack of Hershey's chocolate bars.

And he just walked up to people saying, hey, today's your lucky day. You can choose between a 10 ounce bar of silver or a

Hershey's chocolate bar. He went through a dozen chocolate bars and not a single person took the bar of silver.

The thing is that people don't understand the value of the silver. They think, well, gee, that can't be worth very much.

And so they figure the chocolate bar must be worth more. One person said, what am I going to do with a bar of silver?

I can eat the chocolate. The irony is, is that that bar of silver that the guy had was worth about $30.

You can buy a lot of chocolate bars for $30. But to those people, they had very short -sighted thinking.

And what they saw was that chocolate bar, that can satisfy an immediate need.

The silver, that's a long -term thing and they don't know what to do with it. You know, that reminds me of something else, because as we go through life, what we end up seeing is a lot of people make very short -term decisions.

They decide that they're going to take what gives immediate gratification, even though the long -term result of that could lead, well, to death.

What I'm talking about is the fact that we love to sin. We love to break God's law.

It gives our flesh an appeasement, but that sin leads to death, eternal death, if we don't repent.

See, the reality is, is though that may give us this short -term pleasure, long -term sin is never pleasurable.

Sin is a thing that will always take us further than we want to go, hold us longer than we want to stay, and cost us more than we're willing to pay.

And we do these things for that short -term gain. Not looking at the long -term, but if we have an eternal mindset, we're going to look at what counts for eternity more than the here and now.

What is life? 70, 80, maybe 90 years, if you're fortunate? How does that compare to eternity?

The question is, where will you spend eternity? Every one of us break God's law. Every one of us live for that short -term gain at some point in our lives, and that's going to cost us to be not only spiritually dead, but maybe even eternally dead.

And the reality is, we have to look to eternity. We need to trust in God and God alone as the only one that can redeem us, because of what

He did on the cross. When He became a man, died on a cross, He gave us a way of escape.

He paid the punishment that we owe. It's because of what Jesus Christ did that we could be set free, that we can in fact be made righteous in God's mind.

What you need to do is repent of trusting yourself as a good person, your good works, thinking that you'd be good enough.

No, turn from that and trust what Jesus Christ did on the cross. That's the only way to have a right state with God.

Don't look for that short -term game like a chocolate bar. Go for the bar of silver that has a longer lasting value.

That's how I would transition from a silver, the metal, to the gospel.