The Greatest Lie Ever Told

The Christian Message Begins With God’s Holiness and Our Sin

God loves you. For many, this is the Christian message, pure and simple.

God loves you right now. He loved you when you were wrong. He loved you when you were off course. God doesn't need you to put a filter on your life. He doesn't need you to download an app to make yourself look better.

God likes you. He loves you just the way you are. Live in the freedom that God loves you unconditionally.

God will never, never, never, never, never, never stop loving you. Even if you chose to reject him and go to hell, God will still love you. Because God's love is eternal. He made you to love you. God will never love you anymore, but he loves you right now.

I said you're free right now. Cleanse right now. Somebody shout, I am. I am his child. I am accepted.

Knowing that God loves you perfectly and unconditionally, that he will never stop loving you.

How could anyone have a problem with such an encouraging and beautiful message as God loves you? Well, there are at least two issues here. First, God loves you doesn't communicate the fullness of the Christian message or the gospel.

And second, we need to understand what God's love really means. Should we begin the Christian message with God loves you as many Christians do?

No. Walk up to someone and say God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Can you imagine telling that to an American? Sir, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. What? God loves me?

That's great because I love me too. Oh, this is wonderful. And God's got a wonderful plan. I got a wonderful plan for my life too. And if I accept him into my life, I'll have my best life now. This is absolutely wonderful.

That is not biblical evangelism.

We should begin with who God is and who we are.

God’s Character Revealed in Exodus and the Need for Repentance

Let me give you something in its place. God comes to Moses and he says this. The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth, who keeps loving kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin.

Yet he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. The reaction of Moses. Moses made haste to bow low toward the earth. Worship. Evangelism begins with the nature of God. Who is God? Can a man recognize anything about his sin?

If he hath not a standard with which to compare himself. If we tell him nothing but trivial things about God that tickle the carnal mind, will he ever be brought to genuine repentance and faith? We do not begin with God loves you and has a wonderful plan.

We begin with a discourse of the full counsel of who God is. And we tell him from the start it may cost him his life.

Paul himself begins the book of Romans with the depth of our sin against God because in order to understand God's love and grace towards us, we need to first understand why we need God's love and grace.

Hell, Salvation, and the Wrath to Come

Yes, Jesus was a hellfire preacher. When we talk about salvation, the word has to be used. The word has to be used. Because we're talking about rescue. Salvation is a word that means deliverance or rescue.

And the question is from what? Contemporary kind of corrupted Christianity would offer many psychological and even material substitutes for hell. We would say, well, Jesus wants to save you from loneliness, or He wants to save you from purposelessness, or He wants to save you from anxiety, or He wants to save you from poverty, or He wants to save you from failure, or He wants to save you from sickness, or He wants to save you from disappointment.

No, no, He desires to save you from hell, from the fiery hell, the lake of fire that is eternal. The message of Scripture is that salvation is a rescue, a rescue from a real place called hell.

An important question is, if God loves sinners, then why would God punish sinners with hell? If you like this video, subscribe to help spread the message. Some Christians teach that God doesn't want anyone to go to hell, and that people only go to hell because they choose themselves to go to hell.

God loves us. He's not going to give up on us. Our moral choices have real consequences, and the stakes are so high because our failure actually creates death. In God's good world. But God loves us. He doesn't want to kill us.

Hell is not somewhere where humans go kicking and screaming. Hell is actually something that we want. We want it, and we choose it.

But Romans 9 teaches that God is actually glorified through the display of His wrath and power in punishing sinners for their deserved sin.

That means, first, that you exist for God's purposes. You exist for God's purposes. You do not exist at your own pleasure. You do not exist for your own purposes. Nor do you get to determine the purpose for which you exist.

God has determined the purpose for which you exist. And the shorthand answer is, the purpose for which you exist is the glory of God, however He chooses to glorify Himself in and with and through your life.

Common Grace, Special Grace, and the Love of Complacency

With this knowledge, how should we understand the phrase, God loves you? Well, we need to recognize that God loves two different groups of people in two very different ways. First, we can say that God loves every human being in the sense that He provides common grace to every human being.

In other words, He blesses every human being with life and earthly blessings like sun and rain. This kind of love that God has for every human being is a general kind of love.

The first distinction here regarding grace is a distinction that's important, and that is a distinction between what we call common grace and what we call special grace. Common grace and special grace.

Common grace is called common because it is virtually universal. It refers to that grace that God gives to all people indiscriminately. The mercy and kindness that extends to the human race, as distinguished from the special grace of redemption that God gives to the saved.

So, common grace is the grace of God that we all experience in a broad sense. For example, the Bible, when it speaks of the providence of God, says that the rain falls on the just and on the unjust.

And second, God has a special saving kind of love toward His special people who have repented of sin and put their faith in Jesus Christ alone for their salvation.

But usually when we're talking about the love of God in popular language, what really is what we're talking about is what we call God's love of complacency. And that term, the love of complacency, is not used in the way in which we use the term complacency in our age, in our culture, in our complacency.

Our term of complacency means smugness, self-satisfaction, that sort of thing. But rather when the Scriptures indicate the love of complacency, it's that special love that God has for His Son and all of those who are in His Son and who are adopted into His family.

And if we talk about the love of God in His terms of the love of complacency and talk about it universally, that's blasphemy because God does not love the whole world in the love of complacency. The fact the Scriptures tell us that there are many ways in which God is enmity with the world.

He hates the world. He hates those who are swift to shed blood. And we have to take that into account. When I hear preachers stand up and say that God loves everybody unconditionally, I want to scream and say, wait a minute, then why does He call us to repent?

Why does He call us to come to the cross? Why does He call us to come to Christ? If God loves everybody unconditionally, then you can do whatever you want and believe whatever you think. That's just not true that God loves His Son.

He's placed an absolute condition by which He requires. He doesn't just invite people to come to His Son. He commands all men everywhere to repent of their sins and to come to Christ. And if you want to enjoy the love of complacency, you have to be in Christ.

Regeneration, New Birth, and Grace Alone

Did these people earn God's special, saving love somehow? Of course not. God is the initiator of this kind of love. And Ephesians chapter 1 tells us that God chose before the creation of the world, everyone who would be saved through faith in Jesus.

You are a rotting corpse.

You are not almost dead. You are not nearly dead. You're dead, which means that the only hope is the grace of God. But watch what happens. You were dead and now you get life. God made us alive together with Christ.

You were dead, but now you're alive together with Christ. This is important. This is the doctrine of regeneration. This is God making us alive. This is God making us born again. And no matter how many times we hear out there in popular evangelicalism that we sort of born ourselves again, you can no more born yourself again than you born yourself the first time.

Being born again is an act of God. Being born again is a supernatural act. Being born again is something that you don't ask for. You don't have sense enough to ask for. You're dead. God does this. And it's by his grace that he does this.

And it's for his glory that he does this. It is because of Christ that he does this. And it is by grace alone.

Repentance, Faith, and the Wrath of God

In short, if you have repented of sin and have put your faith in Jesus Christ alone for salvation, you can have the confidence that you are the object of God's special, saving, unconditional, infinite love.

The big problem with starting the Christian message with God loves you is simply that it's not the Christian message. The Christian message is that you are a sinner and that Jesus' suffering and death on the cross is the display of God's love for all who repent and believe.

At this moment, God commands all men to repent and believe that today is the day of salvation, that you are to flee from the wrath to come, to flee from the law of Moses that condemns you into the city of refuge who is Jesus Christ our Lord.

Run to him.

But if you do not repent and believe, you are still an enemy of God. And the wrath of God remains upon you. And the message to you is this. You still have time. Repent and believe.