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What is the Gospel? preached by Mark Spence of Living Waters at the Equip NorCal conference 2018. This podcast is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and all our resources strivingforeternity.org Listen to other podcasts on the Christian Podcast Community: ChristianPodcastCommunity.org Support us at http://www.patreon.com/StrivingForEternity Please review us on iTunes http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rapp-report/id1353293537 Give us your feedback, email us [email protected] Like...
The following message was delivered at the Equip NorCal conference 2018.
This is Mark Spence from Living Waters. Maybe you've heard of them, Way of the Master, Ray Comfort, Kirk Cameron.
But Mark delivered a message called, What is the Gospel? And this is the sermon he had proclaimed at the
Equip NorCal event 2018. Welcome to the
Rap Report with Andrew Rapaport, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications.
This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.
Well, thank you for having me.
It is an absolute delight to be here. I'm having dinner with Steve and his wife, great
Chinese food. Often asked if I like Chinese, and I say, yeah, they're great people.
But it is an absolute delight to be here. My wife is very supportive of my travels.
Sometimes she offers to take me to the airport three days early. She's shaking her head, no, that's not true.
Four and a half weeks. Well, open your
Bibles to, or those apps, to 1
Corinthians chapter 2. I'm going to springboard off of verses 1 through 5.
As we get into this teaching, what is the gospel? What is the gospel?
We'll be taking a look at the sufficiency of the gospel as well. And before we get into all of that, we're going to look at the insufficiency of the man.
Now, man is insufficient in and of himself, but it's not about the man or the woman.
It's about the gospel. The gospel is, according to Romans 116, the power of God onto salvation.
The word gospel is actually used a little more than 70 times throughout the New Testament. Most of the times, at least three times more than any other author.
The Apostle Paul had broken down the gospel. And then Matthew and Mark would come in second and third in the midst of that.
And then it's scattered throughout more than that. Gospel, good news. But let's take a look at 1
Corinthians chapter 2, starting in verse 1. And I, brethren, when
I came to you, did not come with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring to you the testimony of God.
For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling.
And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the
Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.
Pray with me once again. Father, we come to Your Word knowing that when
You speak to us, it is Spirit and life. Would You perform the surgery on us that is needed in order to walk in the work which
You have prepared beforehand? We sanctify this next 45 minutes to an hour in this room in the name of Jesus Christ.
And we simply ask that You would accomplish all that is within your heart.
Stamp eternity on our eyelids as the great physician. We get up on Your operating table, and we ask that You would perform surgery for our good and for Your glory.
It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen. John MacArthur, one of my favorite teachers, he said,
Effective evangelism depends on the faithful proclamation of the
Word. God will prepare the soil and bring forth the fruit.
We must be faithful to plant the seed. Several years ago
I took my little girl Ella on a special daddy -daughter date. And I wanted to take her to someplace a little nicer than where I normally take her.
So this time I took her to Wendy's. And as we were looking up the dollar value menu items that were there, a bunch of college -age students had walked inside the restaurant.
These kids were in suits. The girls were in business attire themselves. And I mustered up the courage to ask,
Why are you dressed so nice? And one of the gentlemen answered and said,
Well, we are part of an epidactic debate team. We just came from a mock trial.
We travel around the United States. And then, as if he was gazing into my soul, he said,
We will debate anybody on any subject at any time and in any place.
You can imagine what was going through my mind. So I looked at him and I said,
Oh yeah? Well, good luck with that. And I walked away.
And I'll tell you why I walked away. As my little girl went and sat at our table enjoying our frosty and fries.
It's because it is very difficult for me to be around people like that.
One of my greatest fears is public speaking. I read books on how to communicate with other people.
I have a handful of books that I have read. Voice fluctuation, eye contact, look above if you can't handle looking at them in the eyes.
So one of my greatest fears is being in front of people. But I also have become fully convinced that God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise so that nobody will go like this when they are used.
Well, I went and sat down at the table. And as we're sitting there, somebody had blasphemed really loud from that group.
My little girl Ella with eyes as big as saucers looked at me and said, Daddy, you got to go share the gospel with them.
I said, Peanut, you best just shut your mouth. And then once again, somebody had blasphemed again.
And she said, Daddy, you have to at least go give them all gospel tracts. And I said, Honey, I don't think
I have enough for this clan here. There's like 25 of these people. She's all,
I have plenty with my secret stash in the car. I said,
Of course you do, my little homeschool princess. We made our way out to the car and I looked at her and I said,
Listen, Daddy's really nervous. You know that I would much rather gargle turtle vomit than go back in there.
I said, I think that we should pray for a moment. Six years old. And she looks at me and the essence for what she said was simply this.
Daddy, there's a time to pray and there's a time to move. I just looked at her and I said,
All right, baby, let's do this. And we went back inside and I reached over to them. And I had these million dollar bills like you guys have in the back seat.
Right. And I said, Hey, listen, my little girl, Ella, who's right. Who did she go?
I go, Baby, what you doing under the table? And so she was underneath the table with her knees clicking together.
And I said, Is there room for dad? And she said something to me that I've said to her as long as I can remember, which was simply this.
You can do it with God's help. So I leaned over to the crowd and I say,
Hey, listen, my little girl, Ella and myself want to make sure that you each get one of these. It is a gospel track.
It tells you how you can avoid hell, come in a relationship with your maker and go to heaven. You don't have to have it.
You don't have to take it. But I do have enough for everybody if you'd like to have one. And I don't know if you've ever had one of those moments where something starts to come out here, but it definitely did not originate here.
And I said, Would you like to have a debate? Right?
I said, Who's the head of your debate team? And it was as if the Red Sea parted.
Dakota levitated over everybody and down Dakota came. That was her name. She sat there and she stood there in the midst and she said,
What would you like to debate? I said, Well, something to do with Christianity. She said,
Pick a nuanced section of Christianity that you want to debate. And I was just shocked that she was ready to discuss any nuanced branch of Christianity.
Did Jesus really rise from the dead? Is the Bible God's word? Is Trinity a biblical term?
It didn't matter. She was ready to go. And quite frankly, I was a little embarrassed and I was ashamed.
So we started to debate on Christianity, whether Christianity was true.
The jury, the rest of the crew stood aside and they sat down and we started to go back and forth.
And as we started going back and forth, I told her that she could have the final word, her closing statements.
And this is what she said. She didn't say anything.
Her mouth was shut. And I'm reminded of the words of the late great apologist, Greg Bonson.
He said, It is not our job to open people's hearts. It's our job to close their mouths in love.
And when we speak the truth in love with a good dosage of apologetics and the use of the law, that very thing will take place.
I looked at the jury and I said, Hey, so what do you think? Are you ready to get right with God? It's not what do you think of the debate?
Are you ready to get right with God? And they all put their head down in shame and they all walked away.
Except for one one. One of the kids, he looked over at me and he said, Are you kidding me right now? That was awesome.
He's a listen. I watch you every single day. And then to see you do this in person. Man, this was a real treat.
And I said, Man, where were you? Thirty five, forty minutes ago. He said,
I had your back. I said, Yeah, way back. But if you examine what took place there that evening, you would think that it was not a very fruitful time.
I think we confuse fruitfulness and faithfulness. God is not calling you to be fruitful.
He's calling you to be faithful. To be faithful with what the gospel, the gospel, the good news.
You see, the gospel is the power of God onto salvation. The Jew first and then the Gentile.
Why the Jew first? Because it went to the Jew first. And then the Gentile. And Paul wasn't ashamed of it.
Yet if we look at a text here, we see that the apostle Paul had a problem with the man in the mirror. And the man in the mirror says that he had no eloquence of speech.
And then he said, Hey, listen, I didn't have human wisdom. I wasn't trying to befuddle them with my cute stories and my quaint words.
I just got right to it. Jesus Christ and him crucified. So not only did I not have eloquence of words, but I didn't have humanly wisdom to try to win them over in that way.
But I also had fear. And I had weakness. And I had much knee -knocking, hide me underneath the table at Wendy's, trembling.
And I don't know about you, but that describes me. And this also describes Moses in the
Old Testament, Exodus 2 -4, where God commissions Moses to go before Pharaoh and the
Jewish elders to let his people go. And he has excuse after excuse why he's not the guy for the job.
Until he finally just refused to accept the call. Where's your brother Aaron?
You see, God's going to accomplish his will. His word is going to go forth. He has his remnant that he wants to reach out and touch.
And as we look at the Apostle Paul having the same problem as Moses and me, he did not allow that to hold him back.
And I have a motto. My motto is this. If you're going to fail, fail by falling forward.
Get into that batter's box. Take that first step out of the boat. It doesn't matter how tumultuous the storm is, as long as your eyes are on the
Lord. In Mark 1 -17, Jesus said, follow me and I will make you to become a fisher of men.
And this tells me that the best ability is availability. That God is not looking for fishers of men.
He wants to turn you into a fisher of men. He wants to make you what you're not. Not many wise are called and chosen.
I will make you who I want you to be, and I want you to walk in the work which I prepared beforehand. There's a message that I would like to share.
It's the gospel. Who will go? And for many years, I've argued and I've debated and I've just struggled with simply saying, here am
I, Lord. Send him. Send her. He's got one -third of the
New Testament memorized. She hasn't tasted the vile things that I've tasted. Surely you want to use him and her, but not me.
And I thought I was sidelined. And I thought I was going to be nothing more than a book on God's proverbial bookshelf, never to be pulled off, never to be read, never to be used by God because of my own sin.
But the truth of the matter is that God is sovereign, which simply means he does whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants.
And he answers to no one, and he doesn't care what you think. And God is in heaven, and he does what he pleases.
And for some reason, known only to him, locked in the vault room of his mind, when he was completely self -sufficient, this creator of the heavens and the earth made man with a purpose, to know him.
To know the God who created sunsets and surfing and seafood and sex.
A God who the only box that he will fit in is the box that says other.
The self -sufficient being who's in no need, no desire of anything, made man.
And he created you and I for a purpose. My pastor, Philip DeCourcy, said, if your hand was cut off, it should bleed evangelism.
In 1 Corinthians 1 .27, God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise.
And God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty. If we can wrap our brains around the idea that God inhabits us, then we will stop thinking that we are inhibited.
Once you realize you're inhabited, you won't be inhibited. That's Vance Havner for you, not me.
Do you realize as a Christian you are inhabited by God Almighty? Now, we have our reasonings, our excuses, why we don't want to step out of the boat, right?
We would much rather lick the inner lining of a Tibetan yak's ulcerated small intestine than go across the street, open up our mouths as we've been commanded and commissioned to share a message that can save anybody if they're willing to repent and place their trust in Christ alone for salvation.
This quote is not original. I got it from Ray Comfort, but he said he didn't get it himself.
I don't know where he got it, but he talks about if you have great difficulty in sharing your faith, maybe these words will console you.
He says, an act of courage isn't necessarily done by those who feel brave when they do it.
True courage is he who feels the fear and yet he does it anyways. Courage isn't the absence of fear.
It's the conquering of it. And the apostle Paul says in Ephesians 6 that we might pray for him.
Why? Not us, but the church at Ephesus, that they would pray for him, that he would open up his mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel for which he's an ambassador in chains.
Of all the people in the New Testament that you would presume was bold, Paul's got to be at the top.
Right, pretty close to whoever is going to be joining him there. But he said, hey,
I need boldness and I can relate to that. 13 of the 14 judges found in the book of Judges all had a handicap.
You realize that? They all had a legitimate excuse why they weren't the person for the job, yet they didn't allow that to hold them back.
They got out of the boat. You see, we do not get to choose what is true.
We only get to choose what we do about it. And truth has been defined as that which conforms to reality.
I like how a friend of mine defines it. Truth is that which conforms to the mind of God. Whatever God says is correct is true.
You see, the truth will set you free, but really not until it's finished with you. You can come face to face with truth, but unless you deal with it and do something about it, then it didn't have its way with you and you'll still be the same person.
Each person needs to decide for himself how much truth he could handle. The truth will set you free, but not until it's finished with you.
Ray Comfort talks about how he was reading a magazine, a Christian magazine, and the author of this article said,
Would you be more zealous in your evangelistic endeavors if you knew you were going to be given $1 ,000 for every person you shared the gospel with?
And he recalls closing the magazine, setting it down, and saying, I am so ashamed because I know that I would be more zealous in my evangelistic endeavors if somebody was going to give me $1 ,000 for every person
I simply handed a tract to or attempted to get into a conversation with.
He says, Isn't it funny that what you're not willing to do for the love of God, you are willing to do for the love of money?
And the Bible says no one can serve both God and money. You either love the one or you'll hate the other.
Maybe we're not as in love as we think we are. Carl Sagan said,
When you're in love, you want to tell the world. Are you telling the world about someone who can save anyone?
G. Campbell Morgan said, To call a man evangelical, who is not evangelistic, is an utter contradiction.
Now, let's get into the message. What is the message? What is the message that we share? The message is very simple, right?
It is the death, burial, and resurrection of the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Let me share with you how
I share the gospel when I'm on the college campuses. And in so doing, as we have this little dialogue here, monologue really,
I'm not expecting anything from you. We're going to break down the finer points.
I really have, when I say a gospel message,
I think it is nearly impossible to give a complete gospel presentation.
That's what the Bible is. The Bible is a complete gospel presentation. I think that we are called to give as much of a sufficient gospel presentation as we possibly can.
Where we start with God, the creator of the heavens and the earth. Then we have man, this image bearer of God. And then we have the fall of man.
And then we have, what? The giving of the law, the breaking of the law, the promise of a Messiah to come, this period of silence.
Then we have man, just left to himself, hoping that this Messiah is going to come to remove the sins of the world, which is how somebody was saved in the
Old Testament. The Messiah is going to come. And then we have Jesus, born of a virgin, fulfilling all of these prophecies.
And then we're saved by grace, through faith. It's not of yourself. Then we have repentance and we have resurrection.
We have an ascension. We have a call to action. So when we begin to put all of these points together, we really have more of a sufficient gospel presentation than we possibly can.
You know, we talk about the eyewitness accounts. There's so much we can get into. Which one do you remove? Well, as we look at Scripture, it really sums it up in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But you realize, if you just say the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, it really is not an even sufficient gospel presentation because the day and age in which we live, people don't understand what those terms even mean.
The death of who? Jesus. Jesus. And you have to begin to break down what you're even talking about.
In order to have a right standing before God the Father, you realize that comes through the life of Christ, not the death of Christ.
Righteousness, a right standing before God the Father, is done through the perfect obedience of Jesus Christ, who kept the law.
We have our forgiveness through the death, but the life, the righteousness to stand before God, it's done through the life of Christ.
So it wasn't just enough for Jesus to die, but he had to live a perfect life. Otherwise, if Jesus were to just die, that just puts us back at Adam and Eve.
We need to have a right standing before the Father. Now we begin to unpack. This is how
I do it on the college campuses. You ready? We worked backwards, now we're going to go forward. Okay, I really don't want to be here on this college campus.
All of these people hate me, and they are going to stone me to death.
But I am going to be faithful, and I'm going to stick to the message. If I'm going to fail,
I'm going to fail by falling forward. Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please? My name is
Mark Spence, and I am a Christian. Now, I believe that Christianity is intelligent.
I believe that Christianity can handle your tough questions, questions that have plagued you, plagued all of us, since man has brought a shadow to this planet.
You know, questions such as, why am I here? What is the meaning to life? What's going to happen to me when
I die? If you've asked these questions, you're in good company, but let it be known, someone once said, be careful with the questions that you ask, because there's answers to questions.
And if you're going to come up to the microphone and make a statement, you need to be careful with that as well, because statements have consequences to one's worldview.
So, if you're an atheist and you adhere to the tenets of the flying spaghetti monster, maybe you're an agnostic, a free -thinking skeptic, maybe you're a
Jehovah's Witness, maybe even a Mormon. Listen, I am, in fact, a descendant of the Mormon prophet
Joseph Smith. Maybe you're a Buddhist, part of the
Baha 'i faith, and bahula means something more to you than it does to the guy next to you. Listen, we're not enemies here today.
But I do believe that if you're not a Christian, you've been weighed in the balances of an eternal scale, and you've been found wanting.
Your worldview, my friend, is wrong. So, does anybody have any questions?
And there's my heart, right, just beating out of its chest. And then
I have people that'll come up to the microphone, or I'll have people just kind of stand there looking on, like this guy's just beside himself with craziness.
We did it at UC Berkeley, right? Not too far. You can actually look it up. You can see
Christian Debates, UC Berkeley student. I don't know if it's on YouTube. It's on my Facebook page.
Type it in the search, and you can see an interaction that I had with this guy, this kid who was a history major. And then
I did it with another girl as well. But this is what we do on a regular basis. Why? Because, really, sinners are not going to darken the hallways of a church.
So you go to where the sinners are at. Trying to get a sinner to come to church, well, you have a better chance of getting a bank robber, after he robbed a bank, to go to a police station.
Right? They avoid it. They don't want to come. But occasionally they do come.
And your pastor is faithful with the word, who exposits the word of God. The word is going to come out.
But I'll say that, and people will come up to the microphone. They'll have their questions. And I go, yeah, so what do you got going on, man? He goes, well, you know, like I did at Long Beach State last year.
I had a professor. Comes up to the microphone. He goes, you know, Christianity is not true. And I said, oh, is there such thing as absolute truth?
And he said, no, there is no such thing as absolute truth. To which I said, is that true?
Is it true that there's no such thing as absolute truth? He said, yes. I go, including your statement, you're making a truth claim.
Is there such thing as absolute truth? To which he said, no, there isn't. I go, well, you came up to the microphone, complaining that Christianity is not true.
Now you're saying there's no such thing as truth. My next question for you is, are contradictions allowed within your worldview and when you communicate?
Now, staying logically consistent, what does he have to say now? Yeah. So he said, yes, it is okay to contradict yourself when you communicate.
To which I said, oh, so it's not all right. He said, no, I just said it's okay to contradict yourself.
Right, so you're saying it's not okay to contradict yourself. And I just started contradicting him. Now, he wasn't even getting it, but the students were, and we had quite the crowd by this time.
And we're going back and forth. You can contradict. Oh, so you can't contradict. No, you can. Are you not listening to me? No, I am listening to you.
I think you're not listening to yourself. And then it dawned on him, this piffy, I think
I even saw the light bulb above his head. He ends up storming off.
After I said, hey, listen, listen, I'm not here to embarrass you, man. And guess what this, this is a professor, and guess what he taught for the last 17 years at Long Beach State?
No, debate. Debate, public persuasion, 17 years.
Where his students are gathered around looking at him, waiting for class to start. He ends up coming over to me outside of the camera.
He says, hey, would you mind not using that footage? And I said, hey, well, how about you agree to have a formal debate?
He said, that's not going to happen, but I have to actually go teach my class. And I said, I'll go teach your class. He said, that's not going to happen either.
How about we meet together for a cup of coffee? And so we did. The following Friday, we sat down for two and a half hours, and we began to go back and forth.
And he said, you know, for the first time in my life, I realized that Christianity is intelligent.
When I saw you open that soapbox, what I saw was my father cramming Jesus down my throat, saying turn or burn, fly or fry.
And I did not appreciate him then, and I don't appreciate the message now. I did not think it was intelligent.
Until you begin to speak the gospel.
And when we were standing there, I said, listen, you give me two minutes uninterrupted. I want to share with you why I'm out here, and then
I'm going to give you the final two minutes, and I'm not even going to bring a rebuttal to what you say. You can say whatever you want to say. He allowed me to share the gospel.
That's when he left, and that's when he came back. We are to be faithful with the message.
You know, when you're talking about truth, you know, I often say, you know, all the main world religions, all the main world views here, they all claim to point to truth, right?
The Vedas, which is the Hindu scriptures, they say that truth is mysterious. It's elusive.
You know, it's hard to find. You know, Buddha, at the end of his life, he said he was still searching for the truth.
Muhammad said that he pointed to the truth, but Jesus Christ enters onto the scene, and he never said that truth was elusive or mysterious or hard to find.
He never said that he even pointed to the truth. He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
And then these provocative words dripped from his mouth like honey. No man comes to the
Father, but through me. You see,
Jesus wasn't just a prophet. The prophets of old spoke from authority, and Jesus never spoke from authority.
He only spoke with authority, and with authority, he was able to hush the waves to sleep, he was able to make the blind see in the lame walk, and with his words, he was able to give life.
The gospel is good news. It is the good news about God becoming a man in the person of Jesus Christ, 2 ,000 years ago, to live amongst his creation, and to die a very cruel death at the hands of people whom he created.
As I plead with people to get right, before I get into the gospel, I get into the law, and I deal with a subject called total depravity.
You may be familiar with it. I go through the commandments a little bit, just as Andrew had done prior to me coming up here, because the commandments are going to bring the knowledge of sin.
How many lies do you think you've told over the course of your life? Ever stolen anything? Ever looked with lust?
You're an adulterer. God sees everything you've ever visited on the Internet. And I just go through the commandments, and I break down the law of God to demonstrate that man is an unclean thing, that his heart is deceitful and desperately wicked above all things, that only
God alone can know how bad and how evil and how wicked it is. I was in Kauai ministering a couple of years ago.
Somebody's got to do it. And as I was there, my wife and I were in this canoe of a boat with a guide leading us, directing us throughout the island to take us to this waterfall.
And my wife wanted me to share the gospel with our guide. And so I did.
I shared the gospel with him. And then I said, Have you heard anything similar to this before?
And he said, Up until last week, I would have said no. I hadn't heard this. But last week, somebody shared something somewhat similar to what you just shared.
Some Christian musician named Jeremy Camp. Now unbeknownst to him, now here
I am in Kauai. I'm from Southern California. Jeremy Camp lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
And in one week's time, I'm going to be in Ohio with Jeremy Camp. So I went up to Jeremy Camp, and I said,
Hey, man, two weeks ago, you were in Kauai. He said,
Yeah. You had a guide. And you shared the gospel with this man as he led you over to this waterfall, and you enjoyed sandwiches with him.
And he's just all, What? I said, Hey, man, I'm just playing with you. But last week, I had the same guide.
I talked to the same guy. It isn't neat that, you know, one man plants and another guy waters, but God gets the increase.
And every once in a while, God just kind of pulls back the veil, and he allows us to see the work that he's doing.
He doesn't have to do that. But occasionally, he gives us the insight to that.
Blessed is him who just simply believes that by reading the word of God, that his word's not going to return void, and we stay true to the message.
See, I don't think it's even enough to go through the law to bring just a knowledge. The law has to be placed on somebody's shoulders to show them that they cannot get away from that weight.
You know, Joseph Alain, he said, Every unconverted man would kill
God all over again if they could just get to him. Paul Washer said,
The gates of hell are locked from the inside. Man does not want to get out. He loves his sin.
Jonathan Edwards said, God sees nothing in man to turn his heart, but he sees plenty in man to actually turn his stomach.
You see, we think we're good. We think our good works, perhaps even outdo our bad works, and perhaps
God grades on a curve. If my good outweighs my bad, well, then maybe I can get to heaven.
But God doesn't grade on the curve. He grades on the cross, right? And the very thing that sinners are hoping are going to save them on the day they die,
God's goodness, if God is good, he'll allow me to get into heaven. If he is good, he will condemn them.
Because if God is good, he's going to punish sin wherever it is found. Lying lips are an abomination to God.
No thief will inherit the kingdom of God. No fornicator will inherit the kingdom of God. No blasphemer will inherit the kingdom of God.
I was speaking at a music festival, and I was pleading with these students, 13 ,000 students, to get right with God.
And I said, If you text OMG, you are not honoring the
God who created light and has given you life, and you must repent. God's enemies use his name in vain.
And the Bible says no blasphemer will inherit the kingdom of God. So if you text OMG, if you say,
Oh, my, if you say, Yes, you're guilty. And the student up in the front, he says,
Man, we all do that. And I said, I doubt that. But if you all do do that, then you all need to repent.
And I pleaded with these kids to get right with God. And when I was all done, I went and handed the microphone back to the
MC, Jimmy Needham. He handed it over to the owner of the festival.
And he said, I've never done this before in the 29 years of having a music festival like this.
I'm going to actually tell the kids to take a break. And it was as if God sent like a hurricane.
It just started pouring rain. And he came out and he said, Listen, Mark is pleading with you to get right with God.
We have a prayer tent, or you could do exactly what Mark said, which is just sit at your seat, get out on your knees, and begin to cry out to God to have mercy on you.
Let's take a 10 -minute break. And that 10 -minute break turned into two and a half hours.
Finally, a band, Tenth Avenue North, came out, started playing a couple of acoustic songs, and then Lecrae comes out, some rapper -singer, and he closed out the night, and he got out there like at 2 in the morning.
Guys, the gospel is sufficient. Do you realize that? What the world is in need of is the only thing that God wants to give.
You see, God is the only one who can condemn us, but he's also the only one that can forgive us.
When I have a cult come to my door, if I have a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon come to my door, I don't worry about the theology of their worldview.
You may be accustomed to getting down on the ground and doing an army crawl out, hoping that nobody saw you inside the house, but listen, you don't need to do those things if you start the way
I start, which is simply this. I start with the gospel. I don't get into an apologetical sword fight.
I'm not afraid. I love apologetics. But if you start with the gospel, and this is how I do that, I say, hey, listen, so you're
Mormons. I'm not going to get into an argument about Joseph Smith or magical undergarments.
I'm not going to talk about anything like that, false prophecies. I'm going to say, hey, thank you for coming to my house.
Thank you for sharing with me. You could be doing so many different things. As I reach over here, one of my kids has a water bottle just ready.
Everybody knows their role in my house. Gospel track ready, DVDs ready to give out.
I said, listen, I'm a Christian. I don't suppose you have a few moments to talk to me. They're like, oh, yes.
I'm a Christian. As a Christian, I believe that when I die, I'm going to go to heaven.
My question for you is, why do I believe that? What do
I actually believe is the gospel? I'll say that.
Do you have a couple moments to just talk with me about this? Now, no apologetical sword fight, which means there's no shield that is up.
They go, yeah, you believe this, X, Y, Z. It doesn't matter what they say. They're going to come up short on who
Jesus Christ is and this word called grace, God's unmerited favor to the infinitely ill -deserving.
They're going to come up short. I go, all right, you left something out. Let me explain it to you, and then I want to get your thoughts.
You have time? Thank you. Yeah, we got time, and then I just lay out the gospel. I start with the law, though.
I go through it, and then I go, hey, so does that sound like something you're ready to do? Are you ready to repent and place your trust in Christ?
No, I don't want to. Hey, thanks for coming to my door. I got to go, right? The Smurfs are on, or whatever it is.
I don't have to get into a sword fight if I don't want to. No, I can go as deep as they want to go, but really,
I have much better things to do. I'm with my family, whatever it may be, but when you start with the gospel,
I can even end with the gospel. It's the power of God unto salvation. What these door knockers need is grace.
Grace. And Sam Storm says God does not give us grace by calculated measure.
You need this much. You, this much. You, he doesn't do that.
It just flows, and it flows, and it flows to who comes underneath that spout.
You get a taste of God's grace. God's unmerited favor to the infinitely ill deserving.
And because you have violated God's law, and you're going to stand condemned when you stand before God who is holy, and if he gives you justice, you'll go to hell.
You need God's grace. Which is simply put, you're getting what you don't deserve.
Cry out to God for mercy. What is mercy? God holding back that which you do deserve.
In fact, every time you take a breath, you're sucking in the mercy of God. Thomas Watson.
Every time you take a breath. Because of God's grace, you can have full and free forgiveness of every sin you've ever committed without the fear of God shoving your failings back in your face and reminding you of what a blowout you are.
As far as the East is from the West, that's the only way he works. He removes that sin from you.
And I say, you know what? God's not asking you to clean your life up. He's asking you to lay your life down.
In fact, he's commanding you to lay your life down. We don't invite people to get right with God.
We command them. It's not an invitation. It's a declaration. You must repent.
Because God has appointed a day in which you will judge the world in righteousness. And you do not have a right standing before God the
Father. And that was demonstrated through your breaking of the law. Salvation cannot be earned.
It cannot be earned by good works or religious rituals. And the
Bible says, May it never get old. For by grace are you saved through faith.
And that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.
Grace is everything for nothing to those who don't deserve anything.
And though it's true that there's none who seek after God, the good news is that God seeks after man.
There's none who seek after God. But God knows where you're hiding. Adam, where are you?
It wasn't asked because God didn't know where Adam was at. It was, Adam, look where you're at.
Look where your decisions have brought you, Adam. You cannot hide from God.
There's no place where you can go where he's not already at. You make your bed in hell, he's there. You take the wings and you fly out into the heaven.
He's there. God is there. He is omnipresent. He is everywhere. So grace is getting what you don't deserve.
Mercy is God holding back that which you do deserve. And what is justice? That's getting exactly what you do deserve.
I was in Riverside, California, and I served on jury duty. And I had to decide whether or not this kid was a gangbanger and he had a gun on him and whether he knew he had a gun on him.
And I found him guilty. But because California has the craziest laws in the world, how things are changing, and this is just a quacked -out state, though he was found guilty, as soon as he was found guilty, he was let go.
Right? It was a nonviolent offense. Well, several months after, not even several months,
I think it was like three or four months after that, I was on a plane flying into Ontario. I look over, and that kid is on the plane with me.
And the whole time, this guy's looking at the jury. Now, I got an escort out to my car because this kid's part of a gang in Montebello, California.
And I'm all, no, it's no big deal. But now here I am on the plane with this kid.
And I went up to get my bag as we were going to dock, right, into that little gate terminal there.
I'm thinking terminal. It's called terminal for a reason. I got eye contact with him.
And I sat back down. I looked at the guy next to me, and I said, you're not going to believe this. I go, I hope this kid didn't remember me.
Now, thankfully, he didn't, or maybe he was just afraid of me. Right? I mean, repentance.
It's a change of mind, metanoia. It's to come to the place where you realize that you can't do anything to earn the favor and the merit of God, that Christ did it all.
And you agree with him. You're wrong. He's right. It leads to a change of actions. It does.
It will always, godly repentance will always lead to a right standing before God the
Father. Unless you repent, you will perish. And God commands all men everywhere to repent.
Yet I know that God has to grant repentance that leads to the truth. My message is his message.
Repent and place your trust in Christ, knowing full well that God has to do the work. But that's how
God saves. God saves by the preaching of the gospel. And as we preach the gospel,
God will do the work. So listen, God does not dismiss his wrath against sinners by the wave of a magic wand.
Either Jesus Christ is your substitute, who suffered in himself the wrath of the
Father, and in so doing, he satisfied the demands of the law, or you got to do it yourself in hell.
The substitutionary atonement. Two transactions take place. Christ's righteousness is imputed to me, and my sin is imputed to him.
It's called the great exchange. It makes no sense. But it's true.
And yet, as we've known, the truth will set you free. Each person needs to decide for himself how much truth he can handle.
And the words that I speak to you, they're just words unless they're true.
Because if they're true, it commands and it demands a response from us. We broke
God's law. Jesus paid the fine. God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were still sinners,
Christ died for us. Jesus paid a debt he did not owe because we owed a debt we could never pay.
So therefore, Jesus's righteousness can be credited to anyone who puts their faith in him alone.
And the reason I know this to be the case is because Jesus rose from the dead, and we get into the resurrection.
What is the resurrection? Man, consider this for a moment. The only true story where the hero dies for the villain.
Jesus said, I'm the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live.
And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Jesus was seen by hundreds of eyewitnesses.
He fulfilled prophecies all throughout the Old Testament. And when he paid this debt he did not owe, he paved a way for we to be forgiven.
And he reached into the dark cavern of our hearts, and he turned our heart towards him. It means to be born again.
And somebody said, R .A. Torrey said it, unless you're born again, you're going to wish one day you were never born at all.
Unless you're born again, you're going to wish one day you were never born at all.
So we tell people, hey, repent. Now is the time. Get right with God.
Today's the day of salvation. How old are you? 17. Listen, youth is no guarantee of old age.
Cemeteries are filled with young people. Today's the day to prepare for your last day.
And we just plead with them to get right. Don't go to sleep tonight. Don't cross the street unless you look both ways.
Get right with God. Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
God is offering you a full reprieve. If you feel like you've sinned one too many times, you're too far gone to be forgiven, you've tasted vile things you shouldn't have, you've partook in things that, man, you're quite, frankly, you're just embarrassed about.
You're too far gone to be forgiven. And I plead with the students, and I say, listen, if you think that you fall into that category, well, then you're wrong.
You're wrong. God had me come all the way out here to Berkeley to tell you that you're wrong. And it's not because God sees something lovely in you, but because God is love.
And because God is love, everything he does is motivated out of this love. And I don't even understand it and how all his attributes can work together.
And if you don't repent, he's still loving. It doesn't mean he's going to give you a free pass into heaven.
He's still just, and he's holy. But you must repent.
God agrees with you that you've blown it in some major ways, but he's willing to forgive you and to wipe your slate clean if you come to him on his terms.
And there's no sin in your past or in your present that is greater than God. Your Redeemer is bigger than your past.
So then I say, if you're ready to say goodbye to a life of sin and excuses, if you're tired of just simply running, if you're sick of just being tired and tired of being sick, come to God on his terms.
Lay down your life. Count the cost. He'll forgive you.
He'll meet you where you're at. I say, you don't need to meet with me. You don't need my email.
You don't need my phone number. You need God and you know it. And you can see these heads beginning to nod in agreement.
Yeah, you know, you're right, right? I say, you know, God knows all about you, my friend, all about you.
He has the hair on your head numbered, labeled. He knows your name. In fact, he knew what your name was going to be when your parents were deciding between half a dozen names.
He knows all about you. He knows you're rising up and you're sitting down. He knows your thoughts from afar, not because he's afar.
No, he knows you're a far off thoughts. Even those strange thoughts, you think that nobody knows.
Nobody understands. Listen, God knows. He deciphers. God's here.
You may not have tomorrow. Get right with God. The death, burial, resurrection.
But then you have to expound depending on your audience. My final thought.
I talk to a lot of people who feel like they just simply cannot move forward.
They are haunted by their past. Maybe that's you.
I know God isn't finished with you because you're still alive. I mean, think about that.
It doesn't take a doctor in the back to realize that, right? I'm still alive.
By virtue of the fact that I'm still alive, God's not done with me, baby. Here am I. Send me.
When God is done with you, you'll know it. Until then, get back in the race.
It's not a playground. It's a battleground. It's not a playing field. It's a battlefield. Don't give up.
Don't shut up. Don't let up. Don't give up. Go, go, go until you drop.
And then when you drop, you collapse into his arms. And my sin would cause me to cry out to God, God, give me amnesia.
There's nothing too hard for you. And it was as if God can whisper into your ear and simply say,
I'm bigger than your past. I don't want to give you amnesia so you forget your past, but I want to give you those confident words of mine.
Neither do I condemn you. God doesn't want to erase your past.
He just wants to erase your slate. And by erasing your slate, that's enough for him.
Therefore, Christianity, it's one beggar telling another beggar about the bread of life.
That's it. Amen. Amen. Right. Amen. Let's pray.
Father, thank you. What amazing two words.
Thank you. Father, we ask in the name of Jesus Christ that you would set our hearts on fire and realize that it's not about us.
As the Apostle Paul realized that he had no eloquence of speech and he had no human wisdom.
He had fear and weakness and much trembling. And he was asking for boldness continually.
And Mark tells us that you want to turn us into fishers of men.
Lord, may we never wander outside your throne room.
May we realize that our lives are not our own, that we've been bought with the price. And what lies before us is a stewardship from the owner for the owner.
Therefore, may we honor you with our words and our actions. In Jesus name.
Amen. Amen. Quickly, Justin Peter said, if you want to hear
God's voice, read the Bible. If you want to hear God's voice out loud, well, then read God's word out loud.
You don't need a voice when you have a verse, Jim Elliot said. If God calls me to go, I'm going to go.
Until then, I'm going to stay right here. You don't need a voice when you have a verse. And the verse says go into all the world and preach the gospel.
God cannot forgive excuses. He came to forgive sin. Maybe your excuse is a sin. And remember Carl Sagan, when you're in love, you want to tell the world.
A church that is waiting for sinners to visit the building is like the police waiting for criminals to visit their station.
And if your motto is not one of which, if I fail, let me fail by falling forward. Let me say this, it can be.
I'm tired, quite frankly, of saying here my sin him. I do not want when
I die to hand God a bucket of excuses. Got some good ones in this bucket right here.
Why I never did what you commanded me to do. I buried that talent, that treasure. God forbid that is us.
I brought one item here today. It's a
USB USB. It fits into some tablets, fits into computers, fits into some smart cars.
But this really is. I mean, we've sold 250 million gospel tracks.
We get a million views every month on YouTube on our channel. We've produced books,
DVDs, tracks, Sunday school curriculums, and all the stuff that we sell. I brought one single item.
We sell it inside of our store for $60. It's $40 here. And if you can't afford it, then it's free.
You got to get it. Right. I'm telling you, God's not pacing back and forth wondering how he's going to provide for you.
I like what Randy Alcorn says. God does not bless us financially to raise our standard of living, but to raise our standard of giving.
Right. Isn't that such a convicting word, right? So it's $40 for those who can't afford it.
Maybe 20, 10, whatever you can afford. But if you can't afford anything, it's free. I brought, I think, 30 with me.
So there's not even enough for everybody. But if you want it, it's filled with sermons for myself. Read Comfort Easy. It's filled with our movies.
It's filled with telemarketer encounters. What do you do when a telemarketer calls? Usually just kind of hang up. But listen, you can listen to me share the gospel with telemarketers.
It's filled with common answers to the most common objections to the Christian faith. It has the top scriptures
I think you should memorize for evangelism and apologetics on there. It's just loaded. Yeah, I call it the killer, the evangelism excuse killer, right, because it eliminates all your excuses.