Must Hear Sermon For Our Time

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Good evening. So they kept me for last, and I didn't know whether to take that as a compliment or what.

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And when I asked about it, it was because I have a tendency to go over, I was told.

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So this way, I only ruin your dinner, and not another speaker's time. Which makes a lot of sense, so I understand now.

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If you want to open your Bibles to Romans chapter 1, Romans chapter 1. I'm going to read through, we're going to pray together, and we're going to get into today.

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Jeff Rose, a man who I have great respect for, gave me my assignment.

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And it was to teach about engaging the culture with the gospel, part 1 and part 2.

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So right now is part 1, laying a foundation. And so I want to read from the book of Romans, starting in chapter 1, verse 1.

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Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the

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Holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh, and was declared to be the

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Son of God in power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by his resurrection from the dead.

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Jesus Christ, our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship, to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, to those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints.

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Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my

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God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world.

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For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit, in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing

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I mention you always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God's will

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I may now at last succeed in coming to you. For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you, that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith, both yours and mine.

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I want you to know, brothers, that I have often intended to come to you, but thus far have been prevented.

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In order that I may reap some harvest among you as well as among the rest of the Gentiles, I am under obligation, both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish, so I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.

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For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the

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Jew first and also to the Greek, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith.

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As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith thus far as the reading of God's word.

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Let's pray. Father, I pray that you would at this moment, God, get me out of the way. God, I pray that you would,

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Lord, speak to your people here, God. Do what you have commanded, God.

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I pray that you would open the eyes of your people in a way that exposes,

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God, our indifference, that exposes our attachment to the world and worldly things, change our minds, draw us into deep intimacy with you,

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God, and obedience to your Son. I pray by your Spirit, God, that you'd raise up men and women of God that serve you, that lay their lives down for the gospel, that sacrifice everything for the sake of love for the lost, that,

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God, that you would in this moment convict us, cut our hearts, God, to love you and to love neighbor more than self.

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I pray, God, that you'd put your gospel, your good news on our lips, in our hearts and minds, and that it would flow forth from us with power into this generation, that,

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God, by your Spirit, you would raise the dead in this generation, open the eyes of the blind, open the ears of the deaf.

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I pray, Lord Jesus, that you would draw your sheep out of the world. We know that you have them and that you have the power to do so.

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We just pray, God, that this generation, you would use us in this generation to lead your sheep out of darkness into light by preaching the uncompromising gospel of your

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Son, Father. In Jesus' name, amen. It's an amazing thing to be called by God as his slave.

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Paul opens up his epistles to the Romans. We know that he doesn't really have anything to do directly with the church in Rome in the sense that he doesn't know them.

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He didn't plant this church. But he sends them this letter that Martin Luther said should be part of the daily diet of every

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Christian. And I agree with that. And as he writes this letter, he opens up by saying,

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Paul, addressing them, it's Paul, I'm a slave of Jesus. Here's the master evangelist, the one who brings the good news to the farthest reaches of the

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Roman Empire by the end of the first century. The gospel is proclaimed, Paul says, to every creature under heaven in Colossians 1.

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This is the master evangelist, the one that says to them in Romans 1 that your faith is being proclaimed throughout the whole world.

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Something was happening in the first century. Something was happening with the gospel. And I have to ask the question.

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I'm sure it's been a topic today, and it'll be a topic tomorrow and the next. But what do we have to do?

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And what are we not doing? And what were the heroes of old? What were they doing faithfully? I know we have to ask the question, like, what's going on?

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And I want to ask this question. Is it the power of God that's failing in our generation?

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Is it that the gospel is no longer powerful? Paul says the gospel is the power of God for salvation.

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So is it just the first century that God is working? Is it just during the time of Whitefield and Edwards?

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Was it just spectacular moments for an age gone by? Is God no longer at work?

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Or is it something in us as a church? Is it something in what we're saying? Is it something in what we're doing?

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Paul addresses the church in Rome with Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ.

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A slave. And he says that he's been set apart. He's been set apart for God's good news.

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That's what I want to start with first and foremost. What we need to understand when we address bringing the gospel to the culture is that this is

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God's good news. In this first chapter in Romans, Paul calls it God's gospel, so God's good news.

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It's a good message, good news from God. It's also the gospel of his son, the good news of his son.

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Jesus in Matthew chapter 4 is out proclaiming the good news of his kingdom. So this is good news of God's kingdom.

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It's good news of salvation. It's God's good news. It's good news of God's son. And Paul says that he's been set apart, set apart for the good news of God, which he promised beforehand.

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Listen, we have to understand something when addressing the issue of engaging the culture, our culture today with the gospel.

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We have to understand first and foremost what Paul addresses as he opens up, saying that he's a slave of God, saying that he's been set apart for the gospel of God, he expresses something.

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He expresses it in terms of this. He says this, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the

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Holy Scriptures concerning his son. Now, what we have to understand is very fundamental in engaging the culture with the gospel.

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Listen, we have to build a foundation. We don't send missionaries out and evangelists out and street preachers out and pastors out without a foundation.

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The foundation to all of what we're talking about at this conference, and all that will happen as we leave this conference for the next decade or two decades from now, has a foundation to it.

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And here's the foundation. God is doing something in history. This is his story.

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This is the gospel of his son that he promised in the Scriptures. Grab hold of this. Grab hold of this.

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This is what you need to hang on to as a Christian that engages the world with the gospel. You need to know, brothers and sisters, as you bring the gospel into the world, you need to know that you are part of what

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God is doing in the world to exalt his son, to bring salvation to the ends of the earth.

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You are part of God's story. It's not about just you. It's not about just the person who's alongside you.

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This is God's story that he has set us apart for to bring this good news of his son into the world.

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And this story is something promised in the Scriptures. Grab hold of this. God has promised in the

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Scriptures, Old Testament, that he would send a Messiah. We know the story, right?

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It's an amazing thing that God has actually told us history before it happens. Amen? Listen, this is what you've got to grab hold of.

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We have something the world does not have. I say this often as I preach in our modern context.

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Our children are being raised in a context where they're being taught that they are nothing more than bipedal protoplasm in a cosmos that does not care about them.

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You are meat -boned protoplasm in a universe that does not care. It's not going anywhere.

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It is sound and fury signifying nothing. This universe does not care. All that is above you is sky.

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Your ancestors are simply fish. That's what our kids are being taught.

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History is not going anywhere. It's chaos. It's time and chance acting on matter.

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It's just stuff moving around. Our generation believes that they are just the purposeless result at the end of a long chain of reactions that got them to where they're at today and they're going nowhere.

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Brothers and sisters, we know the real story. God says that He declares the end from the beginning.

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He does according to His will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth and no one can stay

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His hand and say, what have you done? Romans chapter 8, God says that He causes all things to work together for good to those who love

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Him, those who are the called according to His purpose. And then

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God says in Ephesians chapter 1 that He works all things after the counsel of His will.

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We have a God who is orchestrating history and He's orchestrating history for a purpose and that is the glorification of His Son in the salvation of sinners.

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God had promised beforehand. Paul brings it up in the Holy Scriptures.

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What? It was about Jesus. God was becoming a man, Isaiah chapter 9, verses 6 through 7.

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El Gibor, the mighty God, the Father of eternity. Of the increase of His government and of peace there will be no end.

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They knew the story. Paul knew it. Daniel chapter 7, verses 13 through 14.

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Daniel says, behold, I was looking in the night visions and behold, with the clouds of heaven, one like a Son of Man was coming and He came up to the

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Ancient of Days and was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion, glory, and a kingdom that all the peoples, nations, and men of every language might serve

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Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which will not pass away and His kingdom one which will not be destroyed.

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Paul knew the story. He knew the story. Proof that he knew the story is that he's a

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Jewish rabbi that knows his Torah. Shalom. He knows it. And in the

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Torah we know, in the Old Testament Scriptures, all about the Messiah. We see a picture of a

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King who is high and lifted up, who is exalted, who brings salvation to the ends of the earth, who has, brothers and sisters, all authority.

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Genesis 49, 10. Jesus tells the leadership of His day, if you believed

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Moses, you would believe me for he wrote about me. And in Genesis 49, 10, in Moses, we see the promise of Shiloh, this one to whom is going to be the obedience of the nations.

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Grab the hold of that. Ready? I know most of you are probably asleep right now. So just grab hold of this.

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Wake up for now. Okay, we good? Is everyone good? We good? Okay, good. Okay. All right. Okay. So Genesis 49, you guys can smile in church.

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You guys know that, right? Okay. I can't tell if you guys are sleeping or angry with me. Okay, here we go. Genesis 49, 10.

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All right, so the promise is that Shiloh comes and to him is going to be the obedience of the nations.

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Listen closely. The obedience of the nations. And Paul says, in referring to what

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God promised beforehand to the church in Rome, whose faith is being proclaimed throughout the entire world, he says that their purpose, listen, is to bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations.

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That's Romans 1. In Romans 16, Paul bookends his letter to the church in Rome with the same exact statement, to bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations.

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Now, you might be thinking, okay, Jeff, why are you bringing this up? And I want to say this because this gets to the heart of the questions that I asked.

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What's wrong with us is how we are bringing the good news of Christ and his authority and salvation to our generation.

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We're treating the good news of Jesus Christ as though it were a good option, a good idea.

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When in reality, what Paul knew, the master evangelist who's responsible for bringing the good news across the

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Roman Empire to the farthest reaches of the known world at the time, what he knew is that Christ has all authority.

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He gets the world, brings salvation, and he's in charge here. And he commands men everywhere to repent, not asks them permission.

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Commands men everywhere to repent, which was the message of Paul at the

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Areopagus. This is God's story. We know the promises. Isaiah 53 is absolutely glorious.

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If you haven't spent time memorizing that passage, do so. A book written hundreds of years before the time of Christ, we've got a copy, a piece of it, from 200 years before the time of Christ that is screaming at us about Jesus.

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Isaiah 53, the one who God would crush for our iniquities, the one who would be counted among the rebels, the one who would justify the many as he would bear their iniquities, the one that God the

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Father was pleased to crush, putting him to grief. We've all gone astray like sheep, but God has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

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We know the story. This Messiah comes to save sinners, to take their sin, to bear it all, and to wash us, to cleanse us.

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We know the promise of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31, 31, that God would make a new covenant where he'd remember their sins no more.

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That's amazing. That he'd write the law in our hearts, no longer on stone tablets outside of the people of God, but now inscribed within them by God himself.

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Ezekiel 36, that God would remove a heart of stone and give a heart of flesh. He would put his spirit within his people and cause them to observe his statues.

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He would cleanse them of all their filthiness and all their idols. We know the promise. It's big. It's big.

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It's not just Jesus comes to make your life a little better. It's not just Jesus helps you just to become a better dad, have greener grass, have great

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UFC parties at your house, pizza nights with other people. This is a message that's all -encompassing.

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It's everything. Jesus gets a hold of everything. Jesus saves sinners from their sin.

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He raises them from death to life. God puts his spirit within his people. God is doing something in the world.

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Paul knew it. And he says this, to bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations.

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And we have to ask the question, in our generation, it's vitally important. When we think about the heroes of the past that brought about the great awakening and great revivals, you look at what they preached, and you wonder, would we kill them today?

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Would the church boot them out of the doors? Men who have megachurches, pastors who have megachurches with the works of some of these giants of church history that God used to shake the world up, turn whole towns to Christ.

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You wonder, are we reading these men anymore? Because what they preached was a Messiah who was the king, who had all authority.

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The Messiah who takes dead people and raises them to life. The Messiah who changes people's lives when they come face to face with him.

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One of the things that bothered people about Woodfield's preaching was the fact that he constantly proclaimed the necessity of the new birth.

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That you must be born again. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you know

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Jesus because you can recite certain things about him, because you know some theology, because you go to church.

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If your life isn't transformed, you don't know the Lord of glory. If your heart isn't new, you don't know him.

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And we wonder, why are we so impotent today as a Christian church? In our generation, is it the gospel?

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Is it the power of God? Is it Jesus who can no longer save sinners? Or is it our message where we fill churches with cotton candy and bubble gum and Starbucks coffee shops?

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We make you comfortable rather than preaching the truth of the gospel that Jesus has all authority in heaven and on earth and he commands you to come and die and rise again.

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That's the message. And someone may hear it today and they might think something like, well, Jeff, if we proclaim the message the way that you're saying it, we're going to have a lot less converts.

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I will take quality over quantity any day. You have a church of 100 truly sanctified born -again believers, they will punch a bigger hole in the kingdom of darkness than a church of 10 ,000 false converts.

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That's the truth. And we worry about proclaiming a gospel that cuts people.

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Brothers and sisters, if we don't cut people, we don't bring the authority of Jesus Christ into their lives.

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What's Paul say? Romans 1, to bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations.

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They knew the story of Jesus was not simply about making your life better. You don't simply add

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Jesus to your story. Brothers and sisters, we need to tell people, you are not adding Jesus to your story.

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He added you to his. That's the truth of the gospel message. Good news of his kingship.

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It's good news that he's king. He brings salvation to the ends of the earth. We need to remember a couple things today.

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Three things I want to talk about. First is remember God's power in bringing the gospel to our culture.

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Remember God's power. The second thing is that God uses us as the means of his grace to bring about salvation.

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And number three, it's the message that counts. So first point, remembering God's power. Romans 1, verse 16, already quoted to you.

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Paul says that it's the gospel that's the power of God for salvation. If anything needs to be heard by us today in our generation, my goodness, it is that.

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It is that. It is the good news that is the power of God for salvation. It's not your interesting personality.

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It's not your UFC fight nights. It's not your taste in music.

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It's not making Christianity looking like a good club to join. It is the good news that is the power of God for salvation.

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It is about taking this message and bringing it into the hearts and minds of everybody that we can come in contact with, everybody that God gives to us, so that God himself brings about his plan.

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It is not about us and our unique programs and our interesting ways we find our way into the culture.

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It is the message of the gospel that is the power of God for salvation. You know this silly,

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I'm preaching to the choir in this church, but sometimes I have to say it. If anyone ever sees this on YouTube, I'm talking to you, okay.

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You know the popular quote that's actually taken, I think, out of context when someone says, preach the gospel, and if necessary, what?

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Use words. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. Why is it stupid?

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Because the gospel is good news. You can't live good news.

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You live out the implications, of course, of the good news. I'm saved. Christ is king. He's in charge of my life.

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He's changed my heart. And so it looks different. But the good news is not something people just simply see in your life.

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They hear it from you or see it from you. The good news is the power of God for salvation.

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It is the power of God. It's what God uses to ignite life into dead people.

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If we want to see people coming to Christ, we need to be proclaiming the message of the gospel, His authority, the call to repent and to believe, what

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He's accomplished. We need to just be proclaiming it. That's why I love the Herald Society. That's why I love my brothers in here who spend their time on the street proclaiming the gospel because that is pure 110 proof gospel ministry.

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It really is. It's the proclamation of the gospel and trusting in God to do the work.

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Proclaiming the gospel and God uses that message to bring dead people to life. We need to put this into the hands of God.

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It's God's power that brings people to life. It is not us. It is not unique ways of handling things.

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It is not neat programs. It's not in our personalities. Again, it is in the message itself.

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The gospel is the power of God for salvation. Second verse. Many of us know this verse.

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I hope so. Romans chapter 8. Romans chapter 8. I just want to bring this to your attention.

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As Dr. White said this morning, I'm not telling anybody in this room anything they don't know, but just reiterating what we do know and saying you need to put this underneath you.

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Foundations are vitally important. Romans chapter 8. Starting in verse 28.

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And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good. For those who are called according to His purpose.

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Listen, for those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the firstborn among many brothers.

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And those whom He predestined, He also called. And those whom He called, He also justified.

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And those whom He justified, He also glorified. We call that the golden chain of what?

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Redemption. The golden chain of redemption. You can't break that chain. And if you want to know how to bring the gospel to the culture around you, you have to think in terms of remembering

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God's power always. That one, it is the gospel that is the power of God for salvation.

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And number two, that God has a plan to save. What it means is that God foreknew.

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It doesn't mean that He knew things about history. It means that God chose to enter into intimate relationship with.

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He foreknew a people for Jesus Christ. He predestined them.

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He calls them. He justifies them. He glorifies them. What part of that story are we?

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Are we part of the foreknowing? No. Are we part of the predestining?

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No. Are we part of the calling? Yes. We don't do the calling.

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God does. But we are the means that God uses to do it. He uses His people to bring about that salvation that He's ordained.

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Brothers and sisters, we have to grab hold of this. The confidence that you and I have in approaching this very, very dark world where the light of the gospel is a confidence that can only come if you first stand on the rock.

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God is sovereign. He's sovereign over every detail of the universe. No maverick molecules.

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And He has a people that He has chosen in His Son that He is saving.

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And we go out and we proclaim repentance and faith. Here's who Jesus is. This is what He's accomplished.

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Come and die. Rise again. Come. Turn from your sin. Embrace this Savior. Trust in Him and what

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He's accomplished. Abandon your self -righteousness. Abandon your sin and come and fall on Him.

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Come to die and rise again. And we throw that message out. And God calls.

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What does Paul say in Romans chapter 1? Called to be saints. Called to be saints.

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He's addressing them in terms of what's happened to them from God. And if we grab hold of our mission to bring the good news to this generation, we have to do so with a firm, firm foundation of the sovereignty of God and salvation underneath us.

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Brothers and sisters, you have to. You must. Because let me tell you right now, this is vitally important for us to grasp.

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And if you are feeling called by God to do this kind of ministry, you need to listen very, very closely.

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You have to be prepared as a believer, as a Christian who's serving God in ministry to preach the gospel.

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You must be prepared for years of fruitless ministry. You have to be prepared for times where you go out and you spread the seed of the gospel.

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You preach it. You proclaim it with all your heart, with fire. And you see nothing.

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You see no fruits. You see nothing in the circumstances that would appear in any way like God is even working.

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You have to be prepared for lots of suffering. You have to be prepared for lots of discouragements.

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You have to be prepared for it with the knowledge that God is the one who foreknows, predestines, calls, justifies, glorifies.

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He is the one who's ordaining this. It's really amazing. I have so many stories I can tell you. And I want to try to avoid putting myself in a sermon as much as possible, but I do want to share this at least for your encouragement.

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For many, many years when I went out to preach the gospel, when I first went out to Arizona in 1996,

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I ran into Dr. White. Actually, for the first time there, outside the Mormon Temple in Mesa, over 100 ,000 people come during the

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Easter pageant we're actually going to next week. At the Mormon Temple, the Mormon Visitor Center in Mesa, Arizona, 100 ,000 people.

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So I go out and very few Christians, maybe 10 at the most, maybe 10, maybe, that's a big day, 10

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Christians out ministering to 100 ,000 people. And so many times

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I went out there and just preached the gospel and talked to people and saw absolutely nothing. There were times where I was spit on.

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There were times where I was cussed out. Times when people threatened me physically. And you'd see really no fruit.

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I remember people telling me at the time when they heard that I would go, they would tell me, don't do that. That's not how you're going to reach those people.

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You can't do that. Make friends with them. Take them out to dinner. Invite them to have hot chocolate with you.

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But don't go out to preach the gospel in that way. That is not how you reach people in this generation. Now one of the encouraging things for me is

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I saw one of my heroes of the faith, Dr. White, out there and I thought, well, I'm going to follow his lead. So that was encouraging.

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But it was constant. That's not how you reach them. There's not going to be any fruit there. This is a different world, a different generation.

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You can't do it. There were times where I would preach the gospel and I'd walk away nothing. I'd be there from 7 at night till literally 4 o 'clock in the morning in conversations and absolutely no converts.

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Nothing would happen except difficulty. And after years of preaching the gospel,

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I can tell you now what God has done through that ministry is that today I have lost count as to how many

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Mormons have come out of Mormonism to Christ as a result of that specific ministry.

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I get emails constantly from around the world of people who were in Mormonism, listened to the videos of us out preaching the gospel at the

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Mormon temple. They came to Christ and led their entire family to Christ as a result of that ministry.

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We were preaching the gospel at the Mormon temple one time. I ran into a Mormon missionary and we were at the temple and he tried to engage us.

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I preached the gospel to him. He tried to steal my tracks at one point and I stopped him. I told him I had 75 ,000 of those.

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If you take them, I'll just get more. So talk to us. And so we ended up in a long conversation over a period of weeks.

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He ended up turning to Christ and he was with us the next day out of his

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Mormon costume and preaching the gospel to the other

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Mormon missionaries with us at the temple. And they told me don't go to the Mormon temple to preach the gospel. You have to be willing to suffer and lay your life down in the trust that God is doing something in history and you preach the gospel faithfully knowing that God is the one that causes all of this to work.

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But he only does so by his spirit through the proclamation of his gospel and by his word.

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John chapter 6. Jesus says, I've come down from heaven not to do my will but the will of him who has sent me.

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And this is the will of him who has sent me that of all that he has given to me I should lose nothing but raise it up at the last day.

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Jesus said, John 6 .44, no man can come to me unless the father who has sent me draws him and I will raise him up.

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Jesus has a mission. Listen, do we honestly think that Jesus could be given a task by the father that he would not accomplish?

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Can Jesus fail? Absolutely not. Jesus says that he has sheep that he is bringing.

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He will lose none of them. That is underneath us. If you're going to go out in the streets and preach the gospel, if you're going to engage family members, friends at work and all the rest, you need to do so with the knowledge that your

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Savior is in charge of all of this. And you preach the gospel regardless of the fruits.

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We planted Apologia Church five years ago and I've got to tell you right now, it looks on the surface like everything in the world was against us.

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God was calling us to do it. It was very, very clear. The elders of the church that I was pastoring at before that laid hands on me and we went and planted a church in a drug rehab family building.

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We had no money, no support, no means to make this work. I have a big family.

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We have no way to feed ourselves. There is no promise of money tomorrow. We don't know where the food's coming from tomorrow.

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All we knew was that God was calling us to do this and we had better go or we're sinning against God.

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And so we went, laid our lives down. Our wives were like, oh, this is interesting. First night we have church at this drug rehab.

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Most of the people in the room were high on detoxification medicine and everything else.

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Most of them were in halfway houses. And we bled and sweat and hurt for the gospel.

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Let me tell you right now, it was not fun. It was not easy.

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There were days where you thought, where are you, God? Where are you at in this? Why aren't you in this?

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Why aren't you helping? Where are all the people? How are you going to make this work? And the beautiful thing about God and His sovereignty and salvation is

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He wants you to be hungry and thirsty in a desert so that when the help comes and when the fruit comes, you know that it was

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God who dropped it from heaven. And this is what you have to expect in proclaiming the gospel, knowing that you have a sovereign

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God who controls all of history and He draws His sheep out of the world. You have to expect that God absolutely will glorify

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Himself. He's into glorifying Himself. It's His thing. He will do it in a way that I promise you will hurt.

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Because He wants the glory removed from your lips and given to Him.

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That is what you must anticipate and you must hold underneath you your entire life, the sovereign

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God who ordains all things. Listen, if I could say something that needs to be heard by people who bring the gospel into a culture that we have today that is hostile to the good news, it is this.

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When you proclaim the message of the gospel, you are proclaiming a message not of will you make

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Jesus Lord of your life? He is Lord of their lives. They must repent and believe.

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Nobody makes Jesus Lord. He is Lord. And when you come into the world and proclaim that, know this.

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When you proclaim His Lordship and repentance and faith in Him and what He's accomplished, you are being used by God, whether you see fruit or not, in one of two ways.

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When that call to repent and believe in this Messiah goes out, you are being used by God to bring glory to Him in His justice or in His grace.

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I remember one time I was out doing evangelism a lot and I'd seen a lot of difficulty, and this was many years ago, and I struggled.

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I had to be just transparent. I struggled. It was hard going out on the street for hours at a time. And you guys know what

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I'm talking about. You're preaching the gospel. You get tired. You get worn out. You get tired. You yell that. And you just get tired.

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You're just worn out. You see all this resistance. You're like, God, just please, just a little bit of fruit. Just a little bit.

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Help, God. I need a little bit. I'm sinking. And I remember that I was struggling one night after just a difficult night of preaching the gospel.

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I was just really struggling, thinking, God, what is going on? Is this a waste? Is this wrong?

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I mean, I don't see anything. Is there a better way to do this? And God that very night brought me to a book that I never really picked up.

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And I just flipped the page open. It was right there. And I learned a lesson that night. It was about the proclamation of the gospel.

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It was about what I'm telling you about right now. That's what God used to shape my heart and my mind permanently in ministry.

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And it's this. When you preach the gospel to the world and the unbelievers reject it, God is glorified on the last day in His justice because when they stand before Him with no excuse,

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Romans 1, unapologetus, with no defense, God will say over them, even when

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I sent my people to you with a message of grace and hope and love, you despised me so much, you continued in your hatred towards me and you turned from me.

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And God will be glorified in His justice of the message proclaimed over a person who hated

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Him. And when God takes a sinner like you and like me and by nothing but His sheer grace and mercy and love opens our eyes and changes our hearts and turns us from being

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God -haters into God -lovers, God -lovers, listen, God will be glorified in His grace.

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So, you preach the gospel, you call to repentance and faith, and you do it despite the circumstances.

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You do it despite on all appearances is a failure. You preach the gospel because God is at work.

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We're talking about the Savior who calls into the tomb of a dead man.

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He has no ability to respond. There's nothing in Him. Jesus doesn't request,

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Lazarus, what do you think, you want to come? All He does is

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He tells His people, move the stone. He didn't even move it. He says, you move the stone, and He calls into there and He says,

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Lazarus, come forth. And Lazarus gets up. That is the

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Savior that we represent. He's the one that calls into death and there's life.

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He says to a little girl, little girl, arise, and she's alive from the dead. He says to His friend, Lazarus, come forth, and He comes.

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That's the God we represent. And all we have around us, brothers and sisters, today is death, dead people.

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And we represent the Savior who brings life out of death. He calls light into darkness.

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Hang on to that. And I want to say this, getting back to a very important part of the message and bringing the message in a proper way.

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Paul very clearly says it's about the obedience of faith among all the nations and he's proclaiming this gospel as the power of God for salvation.

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Listen, we've got to start doing it right. We've got to start doing it in a way that actually people understand.

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Now, God is the one who opens the eyes and really brings about the understanding. Amen? We're all black, coffee -drinking

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Calvinists, right? Here? Okay. Alright, so we got that out of the way, right? Okay. But we've got to communicate the gospel in a way that's understood by people, again, that you are not trying

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Jesus out. People have to understand from us, no, you come to die or don't come.

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Oh, man, that freaks people out in our culture, doesn't it? You tell a megachurch that? Yeah, when they come in, tell people, like, come die or go away.

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People say, oh, we can't do that. You need to, like, give them some time. Sort of, you know, coax them into it a bit.

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You know, give them some cotton candy, some flavored popcorn as they come in. Like, make it easy for them. What are you turning everybody away?

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Jesus did. Luke chapter 14, verse 25. Something you don't hear a lot in our generation.

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Jesus having massive crowds. Imagine for a second, right? Megachurch context, right? It's amazing. The pews are filled, right?

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Filled with new people. They're following now. Imagine that in today's context. You have a church, and one day it is filled up with thousands of followers, right?

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How would we handle that today in our Christian culture? How would we handle it? We would say, do everything you can to keep them.

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Make it appealing. Make it beautiful. Get the best band you can get. Hire a famous Christian band.

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Let them be your worship leaders. Make sure people have all these free nifty -gifties as they come in the door. Let them go with swag.

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Get them back. Now, the disciples had to have sort of felt like this. You think about this? We don't do this in the biblical narrative a lot as we read it.

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We don't always put ourselves really into their shoes to feel what they felt. But imagine it for a second. They're struggling.

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I mean, Jesus had to perform miracles to feed his followers, because they don't have enough money in the church's account to do so, right?

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I mean, it's difficult for him, right? I mean, Jesus says, Fosters have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

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That's a very eloquent way of saying, I'm homeless. You sure you want to follow me? Right? And the disciples, imagine now, they're with Jesus, right?

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They know how much is in the money bag. Judas is stealing his share, but they know it's difficult, right? Thousands of followers think of how they must have felt when

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Jesus turned around in Luke 14, and he says to them, If anyone comes to me and does not hate, and he starts listing out father, mother, sister, brother, even your own life, you're not worthy to be my disciple.

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If you don't do the death march, take up your cross to come and die, you're not worthy to be my disciple.

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Can you imagine how his disciples must have felt? Deflated, right? Like, oh, Jesus, there you go again.

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You're turning everybody away. But it's amazing, when people turn away from Jesus, this is what

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I meant by quality and not quantity. When he asks them, do you also want to leave?

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What was their response? Where are we going to go? You have the words of eternal life.

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They understood. The crowd didn't. And God used 11 very confused apostles to change the world.

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Imagine it for a moment now. Jesus is risen from the dead. He's risen from the dead.

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Very limited followers. Very limited. Like this room kind of limited followers.

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In Palestine. A crucified Palestinian Jew. Alive from the dead.

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Limited followers. First century. And he stands before them and he says, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

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Therefore go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

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Go get them, guys. Imagine how it would have felt for this limited number of believers to be told,

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Go get the world. And you think,

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Well, how in the world would they do it? Brothers and sisters, it's in the commission.

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All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

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Therefore, go. And Jesus went which direction? You're allowed to talk.

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He went which direction? He went up. Daniel 7, 13 -14. The night visions.

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I saw one like a son of man coming on the clouds of heaven and he came up to the ancient of days and was given a kingdom.

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Do we preach the gospel to our culture today in the way that Jesus did? Do we preach the gospel in a

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Matthew 7, 12 -13 way where Jesus says, Listen, there are two gates, two paths, two types of people with two destinations.

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One is a small gate with a narrow path, leads to life. You find that.

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And he says over here there's a wide gate, broad path, leads to destruction. Many find that.

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Do we teach it in that way? That, listen, when you come to Jesus, you come to die. Turn from your sin to come and trust in the

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Savior. He gives you life eternal, forgiveness and salvation. But you must come through that small gate.

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You've got to come naked. You can't bring your stuff. You can't bring your self -righteousness. You can't bring your sins.

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You've got to squeeze through that gate and be on that path that leads to life. Come and die and rise again.

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Be joined to the Savior. We've got to preach in the way that Jesus preached it, brothers and sisters. Listen, please pause for a second.

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Listen closely. I despise motivational speeches. They do nothing.

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They do nothing but inflate you for a moment. So if in any way you catch from me simply an excitement about this and it's just motivational speech, then you're not listening.

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You've got to hear this message for what I intend it to be, please. And that's that we must clearly communicate the good news of Jesus and his authority and forgiveness and salvation in him in a way that makes sense to the world around us.

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The way that Jesus did. Jesus turned people away peacefully.

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He was at peace about it. When people departed from Jesus, he didn't stop and reexamine himself and say, well, what am

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I doing wrong? What do I need to fix? When Jesus turned people away, he didn't say, all right, hang on.

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I'll try again. Jesus turned people away. Are you willing to?

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Are you willing to? Think about that.

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Are you willing to lay your life down as a Christian in a way that, listen, please hear me on this, that does not turn people away because of you and your behavior and your attitude, but you actually are willing, you've counted the cost, to turn people away with the true message of the gospel?

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Because let me tell you what. When you preach the gospel faithfully, you may have a crowd of 50 people, and they all walk away, and one is left.

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And this is the one that God's called. God uses that one to do mighty, mighty, mighty things.

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God raised up George Whitefield, changed the world. God raises up Edwards, changes the world.

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One man. All it takes for God is one man, one woman, that's it.

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But it has to be a faithful message. And that brings me to the second point quickly. God uses us,

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Romans 10. Romans 10. We're the means. We must preach the gospel.

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Romans chapter 10, verse 1. Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to them, to God for them, is that they may be saved.

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For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge, for being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness.

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For Christ is the end of the law, for righteousness to everyone who believes. As you move down, verse 14.

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How then will they call on Him, in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him, of whom they have not heard?

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And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent, as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news.

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But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?

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So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. Your foundation as God is sovereign.

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Second foundation is God uses you as the means of His grace to bring about the salvation.

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Listen, here's what I'm calling you to. I'm calling you to a life of suffering. I'm calling you to a life of difficulty in the gospel.

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I'm calling you to a life of beautiful feet. Of beautiful feet.

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You proclaim the good news, and God uses that good news to ignite life into people.

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You preach it, and the Spirit of God empowers that message into the hearts of dead people, and they come to life again.

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He uses you on your beautiful feet, but you must go. I told you stories of people condemning me as a

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Christian for doing the kind of ministry that we all do, saying, don't do it. And I'll tell you just an encouraging story just to show you the beauty of God and using

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His gospel to save. I'm out preaching the gospel, and I'm surrounded at one point by this crowd of people, and they're yelling at me, and they're condemning, and I'm trying to talk to each and every one of them, and this

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Mormon girl is talking to me, and she's very, very upset, and she took my tracts, she tore them up, she threw them in my face, and she spit on me, and she cussed me out.

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I walked away from that night thinking, can God even use this? What am I doing here?

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This is crazy. But it was awesome. And a year later, we're at my house with a bunch of believers, and it's about midnight, we're eating, which is what

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Christians do, okay? We're at my house eating, and there's a knock at my door, and it's my friend

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John, and he's standing in the doorway with a guy and a girl, and he says, hey, I met them at Starbucks, they heard we were doing a

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Bible study over here, they asked if they can come. I said, well, of course. So they come in, and as soon as they start to come in, the girl bursts out in tears.

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And so I said to John, I said, John, what's wrong with her? He goes, I don't know,

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I just met her. So we just let them in, and so we kind of left her alone, she was clearly distraught, and so she goes to the corner of the room, and we're kind of hanging out, kind of leaving her alone a bit, and we're all talking and hanging out, and she's sitting in the corner, she kind of gathers herself after a little while, and she looks over at me, and she interrupts, she says,

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Jeff, do you recognize me? And I said, no, sorry,

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I don't. And she says, a year ago, you were at the Mormon temple at Mesa, and I took your tracts, and I tore them up, and I spit on you, and I cussed you out.

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And I said, oh, yeah. And she says, she says,

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I'm really sorry. And I said, sorry, sorry for what? And she says, when

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I left that night, I committed before God that I was going to come back the next year, and I was going to refute you in front of all my friends.

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And so I got a hold of one of your tracts, and I studied it in the scriptures for four months.

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And after four months, God brought this Mormon girl to Christ. She turned to Christ, and she was being used by God to lead all her

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Mormon friends to Christ, because we were there on our beautiful feet with the gospel, and God used it to bring life into death.

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But if you don't get on your beautiful feet, there aren't moments like that. God is sovereign. But if we don't go, the means of that grace doesn't actually happen.

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Third point, finally, on the gospel and the culture, is it's the message itself.

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When you look in the book of Acts, read the book of Acts, you'll always see a consistent thing. And it is the message of the gospel contains who

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Jesus is, what the problem is, what he's accomplished, and the call to repent and to believe.

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It's very, very important. People get a little mixed up, and they think, well, I don't really know what to say. I'm not sure I have all the answers. Listen, you need to know the good news.

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And that good news comes with an identification, a clear identification of who Jesus is, what he's done, what's wrong with us, and the call to repent and believe.

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Listen, this is, I think, hopefully encouraging to you guys. The gospel is not a script that you simply memorize and you spit out.

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It's the story of what God has accomplished, the call to repent and to believe, but it can look different, sound different in different contexts.

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You might be talking to a Mormon, and you have to deal with different issues to get to the same message, or an atheist, different issues to get to the same message.

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But it's very important that you recognize this is not simply a script that you memorize and regurgitate.

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I want to encourage you to be led by the Spirit of God, knowing the good news, having it written in your heart so you can say it.

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And God will use you. Listen, very, very important.

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We have to identify clearly who this Savior is, the position that he holds in the world, what he's accomplished, and the call to repent and to believe.

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You just drop gospel bombs. Just throw them out. Just drop them. Throw them out. It's God's power for salvation.

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You'll throw it out, you'll throw it out, you'll throw it out. You'll see resistance, hatred, resistance, hatred, and you'll throw it out. And all of a sudden, kaboom!

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Power of God. Someone came to Christ. And that was all God's work.

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You just preach this gospel. You call to repentance and faith, and God saves. And be prepared, brothers and sisters, for all those times where you are preaching the gospel with all your heart and it looks like absolutely nothing is going to happen, and then

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God saves the hardest person. God tripped me out. Four years as a hospital chaplain,

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I would be in this hospital room every single day preaching the gospel to a new room of people, 50 people in a room, half of them high, half of them on detox drugs, some of them okay, and I'd be preaching the gospel.

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And amazingly, the first couple of months that I was doing this on a daily basis, I had kind of a perverse thing going on in my mind where I was wondering, okay, who's going to die, and who's not?

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And I meant that because so many people were like on the edge of death when they're using drugs and alcohol, and I would think, okay, who understands it and who doesn't?

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And listen, I learned something about God four years as a hospital chaplain, and that is this. God loves to make his name famous by saving the hardest person.

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I saw people that I assumed as I preached that they got it. You know what I'm saying? People that say, oh, Pastor Jeff is so wonderful.

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You're speaking right to me, Pastor Jeff. It was wonderful. You're the Lord's anointed. You know, all these things, and they'd walk away, and I'd think, well, maybe they're kind of getting it, and I'd see the person that would just be vitriolic and mean and spiteful.

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I had people come in and say, I'm in this room just to refute you. Like I had atheists come in and say,

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I heard we can ask you questions and challenge you. I said, of course you can, and so I'm coming for that.

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You know, and they'd sit down. I'd see people going away in hatred and anger, despising

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God's word and the gospel, hating me, leaving with flush red faces because of the proclamation of the gospel, and the next day

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I got to the hospital They'd come to me in tears, saying that God woke them up at three in the morning, overwhelmed with the sense of their sin and their guilt and their shame, and they turned to Christ in their hospital bed because of the message of the gospel, because of a clear communication of who

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Jesus is, what he's accomplished, what's wrong with us, and a call to repentance and faith.

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We need to present people to Jesus, let them get face -to -face with him so he can deal with them, and call them to repentance and faith quickly, and I have sins in this area.

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It's why they kept me last. Okay. The conditions for success, and this will be hopefully brief.

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2 Timothy 2, 24 -26. You can note that chapter and verse.

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It talks about the Lord's servant must be patient when wrong, patient when wronged, able to teach, listen, in humility correcting those who oppose themselves, if God perhaps may grant them repentance, leading to a knowledge of the truth.

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So what's our condition for success? It's what we've already talked about. It's a sovereign God who's the one that opens the eyes of the blind, and he grants people repentance and faith.

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Acts chapter 13, verse 48, when the Gentiles come to faith, it's amazing the response is that well, then

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God has granted the Gentiles repentance unto life. They understood that when people were coming to Christ, they actually pointed to God and said, well, then

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God did that. So what's the condition for success? It's that God must grant repentance.

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God must grant faith. Philippians 1, 29. For to you it has been gifted not only to believe in Christ, but also to suffer for his sake.

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For you to, it has been gifted, it's a gift from God to his people to believe in Jesus and, listen, to suffer.

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And we all say to that when Paul says that, you've been gifted to believe and to suffer.

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We go, I'll take the first one, you can keep the second one. Right? But listen to it. It has been gifted to you to believe in Christ and also to suffer.

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So the conditions for success, and this ought to encourage you, is that God must grant repentance.

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God must grant faith. This is his story. He's the sovereign. We have the honor and the privilege of bringing the good news of Christ's kingdom to the world.

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We proclaim it. And when God moves for his glory, he gets all the praise.

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Repent and believe. And when they do, we say, praise God. He opened your eyes. He gave you faith.

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Praise God. Conditions for success. God must move.

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He must grant repentance. He must grant faith. What is required from us? Two things. Two things.

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Two things. What is required from us? We have to love

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God and love neighbor enough to lay our lives down.

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You have to love somebody enough to do something. It is so easy to hate somebody.

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Here's the easiest way to show somebody that you absolutely hate their soul.

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Don't preach the gospel to them. Say and do nothing. And we talk in Christian circles today about loving the world, and we talk about, you know, sending missionaries to foreign countries.

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Again, praise God for the work that he's doing. He's still sovereign. Black coffee drinking Calvinist, okay?

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Okay, he's still sovereign over all of that, but I mean, we have got to pay attention to the fact that our culture is consumed with the desire to be loved by people, more than being consumed by God being pleased with what we're doing.

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We want people to like us. We want people to be comfortable with us.

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We want people to be comfortable with our message, and so we don't preach the gospel in a faithful way because, honestly, we hate them.

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We don't love them enough to really say something about where they're at before a holy

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God, and so we don't do it. We don't say anything. We don't preach the gospel faithfully because we don't love them.

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You want to start preaching the gospel faithfully to people around you? Here's what you work on. Love for God.

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Love for neighbor. If you love God and His truth enough, you will say something to them.

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If you love them enough, you will get yourself and your comfort out of the way so that you can reach them.

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You have to be, and this is a quote from Dr. Walter Martin, you have to be willing to be hated by the very people you are trying to reach, and what motivates that is not hatred for them.

01:00:11

It's love. It's love. It's so easy to stay home. It's hard to be in a street corner to preach.

01:00:19

That's hard because you have to finally come to grips with the fact that I'm either a slave of Jesus or a slave of man, and you have got to have walked through that gate and already determined where you're at on that question.

01:00:35

Am I a slave of God or a slave of man? Do I love God and these people enough to lay my life down for them?

01:00:43

Here's how you can work on your heart.

01:00:49

Listen, I say this to you because I've walked through this and continue to walk through it constantly.

01:00:56

If God is truly calling you to preach the gospel, if he's truly calling you to lay your life down for the cause of the gospel of the king, and you're not being obedient to that call, because there's something you're thinking, it's, well,

01:01:18

I can't because this. I can't because this. I can't because this. There's this factor or this factor.

01:01:24

Listen, when the call goes out for you to lay your life down for the gospel, and you say, yes, but, there's your

01:01:32

God. You found your God. Whatever is there that's prohibiting you from serving the son with his good news, there's your

01:01:47

God. Moses made the people of God melt the idol and drink it.

01:01:56

Some of us have to melt our idols. Where's your idol?

01:02:02

Where is it? I pray that God is cutting you right now and exposing it in your heart and your mind, brothers and sisters, because I promise you it is so glorious.

01:02:11

It is so glorious to see lives transformed by the king. It is so glorious, and God does it through his people, and what's wrong is not him.

01:02:21

It's not his gospel. It's not his son. It's not his power. It's us. It's us. It is us. It's our message.

01:02:27

It's our indifference. It's our hatred for the lost, and I pray to God that in this generation with his people, he ignites within us a love for him and a love for others that causes people to start telling the truth to the world around us, and last point, we've got to be willing to suffer.

01:02:48

Brothers and sisters, if you look at the apostles in Acts chapter five, they're caught, right?

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They're caught, and they're told, don't preach in this name anymore. You intend to bring this man's blood upon us.

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Don't do it again, okay? So then they're in jail, and then they're back out preaching again. Angel releases them, right, and be honest for a second now.

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Watch. You're preaching the gospel, preaching the gospel. You get arrested. You go to jail, right? Tony's in jail for a couple days, right, and he's out preaching again.

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I mean, like most of us in that situation, be honest. Be transparent. It's okay to be honest. You go to jail.

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You'd be out. You'd be like, okay, I'm gonna go chill. Why? Because I was already in jail, right?

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I was already in jail. I served my time. Like, no one can say they're not suffering from the gospel because I was in jail, right? These guys go to jail.

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Angel releases them. They're preaching again with an earshot of the guys who told them to stop, and they get caught again, and the guys are like, what are you doing?

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Didn't we tell you to stop preaching in this man's name? And what do they say? We have to obey

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God rather than men. And then, after a little bit of counsel, they get flogged and beaten for the cause of Christ, and they are probably cut and blue and hot from pain.

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And it says, listen, listen, this is what was on their hearts to bring the gospel throughout the entire known world at the time, the

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Roman Empire. This was on their hearts. They get beaten, and they go out from the presence of the council, Acts chapter five, listen, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his name.

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And if we're gonna be effective in reaching the culture with the gospel today, we have to love God and people enough to lay down our lives for them, and we have to do the same, be willing to suffer and to rejoice that we are counted worthy to suffer for shame for his name.

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Brothers and sisters, are you willing to lay your lives down? I gotta say this. I think that the problem with us, generally speaking, in American evangelicalism is this.

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None of us have even died. You see, listen, it's very easy for you to lay your life down for the cause of the gospel if you've already died and risen again.

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And many people are in fear of dying and losing their lives because they have not yet.

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Is it an accident that when Jesus calls people to come to him, he says to them, take up your cross and follow me?

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They knew what it meant. They watched it. They saw it. They saw the death march. They saw people with a cross on their back doing the death march.

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They saw it. They knew what it meant. They knew, hey, that's only going one place. That right there, that walk, that march, ends one way for them.

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I know what it looks like. And Jesus says, okay, you know that death march when you see people going to their death? You know where that ends?

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You pick up your cross and follow me. You come die or don't come. And brothers and sisters, while there may be many factors at play here,

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I think one of the main reasons that we are not effective as a church in our generation is this. Most of us have not even died yet.

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Come die and rise again or don't come. Let's pray.

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Father, I pray that you'd bless this message for your glory. I pray that people leave here forgetting us, forgetting the speakers, forgetting our names.

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I pray that you'd use the messages that went forth today to ignite within your people passion for your glory, love for you and love for neighbor.

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God, I pray even now, right now, for those in this room that may be false converts, that you would, right now,

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God, you would break their hearts. You would cause them to repent and to believe in the gospel, to cling to Christ.

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And for those of us in this room that you have been working on, you've been calling to serve you, to lay their lives down,

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I pray that right now you would fill their hearts and minds with boldness, with strength, and with clarity of mission.

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And that God, we as your church would go forth with the good news of the message of your son.

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And that you would be glorified in increasing the fame of your son and exalting him in all the earth.

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God, that the knowledge of God would cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. We pray, God, you would use us now to be a part of that work.