John's introduction to 10 Shekels and a Shirt

I hope that these words will follow you for years to come. I can still remember the very first time that I listened to this sermon. It was 20 or 21 years ago. I had come to the church early on a Sunday morning.

I normally do get there early, but I normally get there a couple of hours early, but it was daylight savings time, and I had gotten mixed up, and this was before smartphones. So I got there three, three and a half hours early.

So after getting everything ready for the service, I still had a lot of time, and instead of going back home, I found a cassette tape that a friend had recently given me. His name is Rick Couples, a very dear, godly friend, and I trusted this friend, and so I thought, well, I'll listen to the sermon because he gave it a glowing report.

So I listened to that sermon before everyone arrived at church, and I was really floored. It was so clear, so weighty, so beneficial to my soul. I felt like he said things that so desperately needed to be said, and he said them in a way that was unmistakable.

It just really peeled back all the layers and got to the heart of the issue. So I talked with the other pastor at the time, and we agreed that our church needed to listen to it and not just to recommend it, but that evening, we took that cassette tape, and we found a cassette tape player, and we plugged it in, and the whole church for the service sat quietly and listened to a pretty poor quality recording of the sermon, but it was beneficial.

It really helped the people. In the earliest days at Christ Church, this was in the first year, it helped us to understand why. Why were we talking about turning our hearts from a man-centered approach to loving man to a God-centered approach to loving man?

I hope that you'll be able to listen to this. There will be links in the show notes to the audio and to a printed version of the sermon. I hope you'll be able to recommend it to people, but more than anything, that you'll find room to apply it.

And this is the kind of thing that goes deep, so you'll probably have to take a spiritual pickaxe, and you may have to listen to it more than once to make sure really that the roots are gotten a hold of so that it doesn't just continue to sprout back up later.

A God-centered religion, the most delightful thing.