God Won T Let You Into Heaven While You Re Still Pointing Your Shotgun at Him — E.A. Johnston

You're not going to want to miss this message, friends. You could determine your eternal destiny. I'm going to speak plainly tonight, because I have a burden for your soul. And like we say in the South, I'm going to give you the oil straight from the can.

I don't want you to go to hell. Hell is a terrible place of darkness, chains, and suffering. I'm not addressing the person next to you, friend. I'm talking to you. Don't think this message isn't for you.

So get the wax out of your ears and pay attention to the solemn warning regarding the false gospel that's been center stage for years now. It was hatched out of the smoking pit of hell itself. I'm going to give you the real gospel tonight, friend.

I'm going to preach a crucified Christ on a bloody cross for sin. I've got an old-fashioned three-point gospel sermon for you this evening. It's entitled, God Won't Let You Into Heaven While You're Still Pointing Your Shotgun At Him.

And my three points are these. Number one, a false god. Number two, a false gospel. And number three, a false faith. Oh, listen, friend. I beg you, lend me your ears. Pay attention. Let me pray first for us, and then I'll start us with a true story that I know you'll be interested in.

Great God in heaven, I come to you now, Lord, and I pray that you attend the preaching of your Word by your Spirit and that you would give grace and open hearts during this message, that you will come and walk among us in demonstration of your power and by your Spirit.

I pray, great God, that your Spirit will disturb folks. Lord, make your Word heavy like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces, and I pray that you would bust up every false foundation here tonight, smash every bit of pride, and come and save folks.

May your Word be as a fire that shines a light on sin and exposes it and points it out and smokes out every false refuge that some sinner here will finally see who revealed Christ and get to Him to save every sin Jesus saves.

Oh, help this poor preacher, I pray, Lord, to point somebody to your Son, Jesus, and I pray these things in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. Well, hey now, friends, is that true story I promised you? And I know you'll really enjoy it, so listen carefully.

The Wooden Jesus and the Deception of False Gods

A missionary shared the following story. He said, you can stand on a cliff in Mexico and gaze down at a certain village of Mexican workers. These people work down in the riverbed in their corn patch, and there they grow their corn.

And when the corn is ready to harvest, they shuck it, and after it dries out, they'll take it and grind it into cornmeal and make tortillas. And then they'll take these tortillas down to the open market, and there sell the tortillas for a few pesos and put them away.

They'll come back out to their house, and there they'll live off lizards. They'll go out among the rocks and catch these huge, long lizards, and they'll eat those lizards and save that money for a special day.

A special day when they will start a pilgrimage up to a mountain, and at the top of that mountain is a wooden statue of Jesus Christ. The terrain to that statue is so bad that most of the people will have to crawl on their hands and knees for a mile, and by the time they get to that statue, they are bleeding all over, standing beside the statue.

There's a priest, and that priest is saying, Now, you love God? Give to Him, because you show your love to God by giving. And those people will reach into their little bags and purses and pull those pesos out, stained in their own blood, and drop that money in the slit in the top of the head of Jesus.

Then the priest prays, and when he is finished, the priest will yell, You have not given enough. Look, Jesus is sad. He is crying. And all the time, there'll be another priest hidden in that hollow statue with a little hand pump, and he will pump water to where it comes out of human-made tear ducts, and that statue is crying.

And there, those people will give all they have, crawl down that mountain, and go back to eating lizards, growing their corn to make more tortillas to get more pesos to go and give to a dead God that cannot move or hear.

They are sincere, honest, and sacrificial in their serving as they serve their wooden Jesus as the God they serve. Now that story always kind of kicks me in the stomach, friends. I feel sick even telling it.

And some of you may feel pity for those deceived Mexican workers who were serving a false God. But hear me now. Some of you are no different from them. There came a day in your life where you got religion by making some kind of profession of faith, and then you got out your pocket knife and carved out for yourself a God that you could live with.

You manufactured a little Jesus of your own who you could serve, but who wouldn't get in the way of your daily living. You could call yourself a Christian and still remain on the throne of your life and rule there.

You've got to have first place in line, first grab at food at the dinner table. You must receive recognition for all you do in the name of God and religion. You must be acknowledged for all your efforts or there'll be hell to pay.

Self must be in control. So you serve a jolly Santa Claus God who exists to bless his little darlings. You have a false God because it is not the living God of the Bible. Your God would never send you to hell.

Your God would never punish sin. He just wouldn't act that way. Your God is a sin-tolerating God. You don't believe in a God who will punish sin. Your God is all love. Listen to me, friends. The God of the Bible won't let you into heaven if you serve a false God.

Some of you are serving a God that won't cut the mustard on Judgment Day. You've set up for yourself a God that believes in a sin and religion. Go study your Bible in 1 Kings 18. And there you will find how the people of God had mixed their religious worship with the pagan deity of the land, the pagan god Baal.

Baal was the Canaanite god of the weather. If you worship Baal and sacrifice to him, you'd have a favorable crop. That's what they believed. He was a god tied to their prosperity. So many of the Jews were serving Baal because it became a crisis.

And it got so bad that God had to shut up heaven and bring His prophet Elijah to confront the people's false worship of a false god. The Jews had a mixed religion that suited them. They were saying with their lips they served the god of their fathers.

But they were really serving the god of the sun with their lives for their own benefit. The pagan sun god. So they would have a bumper crop. So they believed. Well, look, let me take you there now to Mount Carmel.

We see Elijah gathering the people on Mount Carmel to confront them. And Elijah came unto all the people and said, How long, Halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow Him. But if Baal, then follow him.

And the people answered him not a word while they just kept their big mouths shut. They weren't ready to part with the Canaanite god that they served. So Elijah tells old rotten King Ahab to gather the prophets of Baal all four hundred of them to Mount Carmel for a showdown for a contest to settle this thing once and for all.

The god who answers by fire is the one true god, he told them. So the prophets of Baal set up their sacrifice on their altar and they do a little dance as they call on their god. And they even get out their knives and cut themselves to where they're jumping up and down like they got the heebie-jeebies.

But God doesn't show up because Baal is an idol and he's just like that wooden Jesus up on that mountain that the Mexican workers served. He was a dead god. And when it was Elijah's turn he put the wood in order and he built his altar and he soaked it with water even through the trenches and he sets that sacrifice on it and he calls on his god.

And it came to pass at the time of the evening service that Elijah the prophet came near and said Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and of Israel let it be known this day that Thou art God in Israel and that I am Thy servant and that I have done all these things at Thy word.

Hear me, O Lord, hear me that the people may know that Thou art the Lord God and that Thou has turned their heart back again. Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the sacrifice. Well, what happens next?

The text says,. And when all the people saw it they fell on their faces and they said, The Lord, He is the God! The Lord, He is the God! Some of you here listening to me now have been serving a false god that pleases you.

But that idol won't cut the mustard on judgment day. God will say to you, I never knew you. Depart from me, ye who work iniquity. So you better get rid of that little wooden Jesus friend and get right with the living God of the Bible.

Repentance and the False Gospel of Easy Believism

Let me bring you to point number two. Point number two. Why God won't let you into heaven by means of a false gospel without repentance. O friends, listen to me. A false gospel. Your problem is you've never heard the real gospel before.

You've grown up in a day of a modern, diluted, watered down, false gospel. And what you swallowed was just like lemonade. All the scandal of the cross was removed from it to make it more palatable to sinful man.

All the demands of the gospel were omitted. And the gospel you heard can't help you because it omitted man's duty of repentance. My Bible declares, and if you go through and read the Gospels, you'll see that Jesus preached repentance.

His disciples preached repentance. The Apostle Paul preached repentance. The early church preached repentance. And if you study history, friends, all down through the centuries, up until the 20th century, the church preached repentance.

But we quit preaching it. Why? Back in the 1930s, a professor of theology wrote a systematic theology and he taught that repentance was not a necessary element to salvation. And that caught on. And everybody loved that because that's a man-centered gospel.

All you had to do was to believe. Salvation became very easy. And that doctrine from the pit of hell spurned the easy-believed gospel that you grew up with where modern evangelism brought in the way of salvation in ways Jesus never did.

He said it was a narrow way and few there be that find it. And that old boy that came up with that easy-believed gospel, he's sweating hot bricks now. Jesus said, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.

And that means you, friend, even if you are the chairman of the deacons. Do you want to know what Billy Graham's biggest regret was? Let me tell you. I got this from the horse's mouth. His nephew, evangelist Jim Wilson, told me personally that he was with Billy Graham the year before the great evangelist died.

They were out sitting on the porch of Billy Graham's home in North Carolina. And Jim Wilson asked Billy Graham a question. He said, Uncle Billy, if you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

And he said, Billy Graham sat there with a faraway look in his blue eyes as he pondered that question. And finally, he answered and he said, I would have preached repentance more. Did you hear that, friends?

That was his biggest regret. He would have preached repentance more. Let me ask you, brother pastor, when you come to the end, would that be your biggest regret as well? Listen, friends, what I'm about to tell you is the real Gospel.

You may want to pay attention because you probably never heard this before. Let no man ever persuade you, no matter how sincere the pastor or evangelist is, if they present a Gospel in which repentance toward God is not a most prominent place, then it is watered down, false Gospel.

It is no Gospel in which repentance is not a principal thing. It is the Gospel of man and not of God. It comes from hell and not from heaven. It is not the Gospel at all. It's rank antinomianism and nothing else.

So long as you hug your sins and cleave to your sins and you will have your sins, your sins are not forgiven. Did you hear me, friend? So long as you do not repent of sin, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is no Gospel to your soul.

Christ is a Savior from sin, not a Savior for man in sin. If he will have his sins, the day will come when that merciful Savior will say to him, depart from me, you workers of iniquity. Depart into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

Let me explain what biblical repentance is, friend. God Almighty demands as a condition of salvation on the part of the sinner repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ. And repentance toward God means that the love of sin must die, must die in a man's soul.

And that means the sinner in his heart must repudiate his sin and renounce it and forsake it and turn from it all of it and turn to God for deliverance of its power. And saving faith means surrender to Jesus Christ as Lord.

False Faith and the Lordship of Christ

God won't let anybody into his kingdom who is still pointing a shotgun at him. Listen to me, friend. Now I'm going to give you point number three. The point that God won't let you into heaven is because of a false faith that's as weak as a hole in the wall.

You have a false faith. You've made an intellectual ascent but your heart has never been changed. You've been climbing to heaven on a rope of sand. You may have walked an aisle when you may have repeated a prayer and thought you were saved and even the pastor slapped you on the back and told you so but you never surrendered your heart and life to God and took up your cross to follow a crucified Christ.

Perhaps you believed a verse like John 3 .16. You believed that Christ died for sin but you've never truly believed on the Christ who died. You've never closed with Christ. If you had Jesus, He would be your Lord.

He would reign on the throne of your life. If Christ is not your Lord, then He was never your Savior. Like I said, some of you have never heard the real gospel before. You've been resting on rotten plank boards of an empty religious profession and every time you get up and move about, they creak and moan and they're ready to break apart any minute.

By your weight alone, let alone the weight of sin and send you down to the devil's hell, your only hope is Jesus. Listen to me, friends. I met Jesus when I was a 13-year-old boy. A pastor had been praying for me for a long time.

He had a burden for my soul and He wouldn't let me go to hell. He invited me to a revival service at His church and God got ahold of me that night by His Spirit and He's never let me go since. Oh, friends, in tears and brokenness, I gave my heart to God.

I can testify that Jesus saves. Let me tell you about Jesus. He is the Son of God who stepped out of heaven to come to earth to die on a cross for sinners. While He was here in His earthly ministry, He went about doing good, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, feeding the hungry, even raising the dead to life.

Yet what happened? Men cried, weigh with Him and nailed Him to a cross. The cross is the place where men sought to get rid of Him. But by His death, it becomes the place where His saving power flows out to all who come in repentance, confessing they are sinners and own Him as their Savior and Lord.

Christ’s Cross and the Invitation to Come

Look, friend, look. Look at that man on a cross. Look at that blessed man on a cross with his arms outstretched beckoning you to come to Him and believe on Him. He says, Look unto Me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth for I am God.

In the riz, none else. Look, look. Look at that bloodstained Savior for sin. Jesus Christ says, Look, look unto Me. Look, I'm sweating great drops of blood. Look unto Me. I'm hanging on a cross. Look unto Me.

I'm dead and buried. Look unto Me. I rise again. Look unto Me. I ascend to heaven. Look unto Me. I'm sitting at the Father's right hand. Oh, poor sinner. Look unto Me. Look unto Me. Listen, friend, once by grace you see revealed Christ, it's time to come to Him.

The Gospel is full of invitations to come to Jesus. Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Come, come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they should be as white as snow.

Though they be red like crimson, they should be as wool. Come, oh, everyone that thirsteth. Come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat. Yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

Come, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by Me. Come, if any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink. He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.

Come, come to Jesus, friend. Don't wait until you better. Come, bring to Him your heartache. Bring to Him your tears. Bring to Him your failures. Lay your sin-burden down at His nail-pierced feet. The Gospel is for the hungry, the weary, and the thirsty.

Let me ask you, friend, are you thirsty for God? Are you hungry? Are you sick and tired of your sins? Oh, are you thirsty for Christ? Then come, cast yourself on Him. Trust Him as your Savior and Lord.

Listen, listen to this last Gospel call in the Bible found in Revelation. May it be to some of you the voice of God speaking to your heart. This may be your last Gospel call, so don't ignore it. Listen to what God says to you.

And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let Him that hears say, Come. And let Him that is a thirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.