Proving The Sad Truth

Good morning. Is my microphone on? Good. Hello. I'm with some Baptists today. This is great. All right. Well, praise God. Thank you all so very much. I'm Baptist, too, by the way, just so you know. So we're going to relax.

Okay. Oh, yeah. We're all family here. We've been preaching to Reform Presbyterians, Presbyterians, Baptists. It's really just a delight to see the unity in the body of Christ around the essentials and in particular around this important issue.

Why the Speaker Came to Ireland to Address Abortion

I want to just tell you all how humbled we are and how sobered we are as your brothers, being invited here to speak from the Word of God on this issue and in particular being invited here among you in the midst of the coming Holocaust in your country, in your land.

And I want to begin with prayer and sort of introduce everything by way of giving our story of how we actually got into this and then, of course, get into the Word of God. So if you would join me in prayer.

Father, I pray that you'd bless our time together today. Bless us as we, Lord, get into your Word. I do pray that you'd get me out of the way, God. Please allow this to not be the words of a mere man, a man who does not have any earthly right being up here.

Lord, I recognize that I'm here. All of your grace and your power and your plan. And I just pray that you would speak, God, through your Word to your people that it would not be the words of a mere man.

I do pray, God, that this would not be in any way any kind of motivational speech. I pray that this would be from your Word and it would, Lord, encourage us, empower us, convict us, challenge us. And I do pray that, Lord, through what we speak today, you would raise your church up, empowered and emboldened by your Spirit with your Word on our lips.

And I pray with all of my heart that you would stop the Holocaust ahead. In Jesus' name, amen. So I think it's important for me to introduce how we got into this. We were, of course, as pastors in the United States of America, we were, of course, pro-life.

I mean, we are Baptists. We are Orthodox, confessional Christians. And so we would have identified very early on as pro-life. And so in the United States of America, it's a common thing in the U .S. Of course, many of you guys are probably aware of our circumstances.

We've had about 50 years of 62 million plus babies being murdered in my country. It's impossible to truly comprehend that, let's be honest. You do have to really think about it as one human being at a time.

When you think about the fact that today we have about 3 ,000 babies approximately murdered a day in our nation, between two and 3 ,000, it becomes really hard to comprehend that level of carnage. And when we think about the United States of America, we had, of course, a terrorist attack on our nation on 9 -11, early on in the turn of the millennium.

And we think about the thousands that died there. And we have to consider the fact that that is a daily occurrence in my country. And it's a daily occurrence because it was something that was accepted by my nation, not by law.

Abortion is not lawful in my country. As a matter of fact, in the state of Arizona, where we live, there is a current law on the books, unchanged. It is current law in my state that abortion is against the law.

It actually carries a penalty of prison time. And that law is current and it stands. But we've been duped to believe in my nation that a court opinion from 1973 actually was law. It goes against the system of law in our country.

It should not be the case. But as a result of us being duped as a culture, we have 62 million plus babies dead. And in the context of the United States pro-life movement, we have our moments. Every year, pastors will, on the Sanctity of Life Sunday, they will preach a pro-life sermon, talking about the value of human life, image bearers of God in the womb.

We'll be talking about this is an evil that we have to stop in our country. And so that's sort of our moment every year. Pastors will preach that sermon, and then we're on to our other things. We would, of course, talk about pro-life issues in our homes and at coffee shops amongst other Christians.

And as Christians, we would give, you know, give money to the popular pro-life organizations and the industry and the lobby. And that's sort of what we've done for the past 50 years. We assume that the pro-life industry is Christian.

We assume that the pro-life industry is working towards the criminalization, the abolition, and the end of abortion. This is what we assume as Christians in my nation, in terms of the pro-life industry and the pro-life lobby.

They're trying to end abortion, to criminalize it. They think it's murder. They're essentially Christian. And so those are our people. They're fighting the good fight, and we're working to end abortion.

That's, generally speaking, what the consensus is amongst Christians in the United States of America. That's what we're trying to do. And for the last 50 years, we have 62 million plus image bearers of God slaughtered in our country.

These are image bearers of God who are dismembered. They have their heads ripped from their bodies, crushed. They're disemboweled. Their arms and their legs are torn from their bodies. They are poisoned.

They are burned by chemicals. That is taking place every day in our streets. Oftentimes, you will have a murder mill, an abortion mill, next to a taco shop and a massage parlor. You'll have this sort of set up in our streets just as a regular thing.

You pass by the murder mills, and it's just next to maybe even a preschool. You'll have them raising children over here and killing them over here. It's a common occurrence. It's something that we accept, and that's what's going on in my nation.

And as Christians, as pastors, our church, which began out of a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility, a hospital, was a small church. But of course, we would talk about the pro-life issue. We were opposed to the issue of the slaughter of the pre-born, and that's where it stood.

How a Facebook Connection Led to Abortion-Mill Ministry

So how did God get us to this place we're in now? Well, what happened was on my Facebook feed, I began to see pictures from a lady named Lisa Metzger. And I don't know how she got on my page. I don't know how we were friended, but her name was exactly the same name as a girl that I went to high school with.

So I assumed that this is a girl I went to high school with. We're on the same page because she's a friend from high school. Somehow, we got friended. I don't remember how. I'm not in the habit personally of friending strange women on Facebook, and so she's just my friend from high school.

But I started seeing pictures of her in different locations with different women and different babies. And after some period of time, I saw so many of these pictures, I started looking into her, and I realized, oh, she goes out to the abortion mill, and she preaches the gospel, and she tries to help the mothers and fathers.

Wow, these are babies that have been saved for murder outside the abortion mills. And so I was so in awe of this experience, seeing all these saved children, and she's holding them in her arms, and she's at different locations with all these different women from all these different backgrounds and colors.

I thought, this is glorious, and praise God. And so I contacted her, and I said, hey, we have a radio program, and we'd love to have you on to tell the story of your ministry and all these babies that have been saved.

And she agreed, and so we're in the studio one day, and we're on the radio in Arizona, and we're getting ready to go on, and it was about 15 seconds before we go on the air that I found out that we didn't know each other.

And what was interesting is, 15 seconds ago, the tech's like, all right, 15 seconds, so get ready to go. And I was like, Lisa, okay, it's great to talk to you. So we went to high school together. Isn't that great?

And she's like, uh, no. And I was like, well, I thought we went to high school. She's like, uh, no. I was like, how do we know each other? She's like, I don't know you. And I was like, how do we get on each other's feet?

She's like, I don't know. And so somehow, like, okay, airtime, we're going now. And in this radio program, you can get to it in the Apologia Studios channel, apologiastudios .com, somewhere in the archives of the radio shows and podcasts, this radio show is there.

It's about a decade ago, something like that. And on the radio program, she tells us she's been doing this ministry for, I think, about two decades, and she talks about going out there to preach the gospel.

She calls mothers and fathers not to murder their children. She gives them the hope of Christ that's in the gospel, and she offers to help them to take care of their needs. And so she's talking about this, and then she shares with us how many babies that she's saved.

And she says, like, somewhere around 364 babies. And we're, our jaws are on the table. We're looking at each other. Pastor Luke is there. Joy is there. We're like, oh my goodness. This is a life well lived.

364 babies. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, over the last two decades of ministry, that's incredible. Those numbers are amazing. And then she says, yeah, last year. Last year. So that's about a baby a day.

It was absolutely incredible, and it was so challenging to all of us. And here's the amazing thing is that Apologia Church, I was a chaplain at a hospital, a drug and alcohol rehab, and our church came to life out of the hospital.

We were sent from another church. I was a pastor right over there to start a church plant out of this hospital to care for all the people that were coming off of heroin addiction, methamphetamine addiction, pill addiction, and alcohol addiction.

And so we had this very young church. It was a very rough looking crowd. Everyone was tattooed up, had big gauges in their ears. It was a very rough looking church. Early on, people would come because they would know about our ministry, our teaching ministry, our apologetics ministry.

They'd be like, oh, great, I want to go to Jeff Durbin's church. And then they would come in, and they'd be like, never mind. And they would, you know, leave. We were known as that drug church. They'd be like, oh, that's that drug church, right?

It was a rough crowd, but it was a bunch of believers who were new believers in the Lord that were encouraged to be bold, to create righteous controversy for the sake of gospel, to lay their life down for others for the cause of the gospel.

And they heard this radio program, and they said, we have to do this. We have to do this. And so a small huddle of believers at Apologia Church early on started doing some investigations, searching out the abortion clinics that were near us, trying to figure out how do we do this.

And so we didn't know what we were doing. We're not professionals. We weren't trained to do this. All we knew was the gospel. We knew the truth about what was happening in there. They're murdering children.

The problem is sin and rebellion. The only answer is the gospel. And we need to love our neighbors, these pre-born children and the mothers and fathers who were going in there. We'll take care of their needs.

We'll adopt their children. And so as a church, we went out. Our very first day going out to preach the gospel at the abortion mill and to call mothers and fathers to not murder their children, we saved two children from death.

Two children from death because Christians who are not superstars, who are not good at this, who are not trained professionals, went with the word of God. And two babies were saved. And then more babies started being saved.

We got to the point where we're doing radio programs and we would just do our regular show. And then we would say, oh, and by the way, we were at the abortion mill on Saturday and God saved a baby. Or God saved two babies this Saturday.

And so people started listening to the show globally and in particular across the United States or America. And they started contacting us saying, well, how do we do that? You know, what can we do as a church to go do the same thing?

And so we would say, well, this is all we're doing. Go. And so this is what we would say. We would say, you need to say three things at the abortion mill. And we typically have about 20 seconds from door to door, depending on the abortion mill that you're at.

You have about 20 seconds from door to door to communicate very quickly a lot of biblical important truth to a mother or to a father. And so all we would say is when they get out, we say, mom, we remind them of what they are.

Mom, mother's inside. We remind them of what they're trying to suppress because God has written his law in their heart. Mom, please do not murder your child today. We tell the truth. We can't pull any punches.

We have 20 seconds before they go in there and murder their own child. It's the end of their child's life. And so mom, please do not murder your child today. And then we communicate to them the gospel.

You can come to Christ. He'll forgive you of your sins. You can come to him through faith in him. He'll give you life. He lived perfectly, died for sinners, and he rose again from the dead. So that if you turn to him in faith, you will have eternal life.

Come to Christ and live, ma 'am. And then we'll say, we'll help you. We'll adopt your child. We'll give you anything that you need. Ask us. We'll help you. We'll adopt your child. And then in the door.

It is a very difficult ministry. It's ugly. It is dark. You will be attacked. People throw things at you. People have tried to hit us with their cars. We've been physically assaulted. We've had an abortionist pull a gun on us.

It is a very, very hard ministry. People drive by you in their cars. They roll down their windows and they curse you out. They say all manner of evil things about you as you stand out there standing for the lives of these preborn children.

It is an ugly and a very hard ministry. But as a result of going, just faithfully going out there and preaching the gospel, Apologia Church alone has saved countless babies. We don't even know how many exactly have been saved.

We stopped counting somewhere I think around 130 or 150 children that just Apologia Church had saved years ago. And of course, as a result of God starting End Abortion Now, which is essentially just a ministry of Apologia Church that gives free training and free resources, asks for nothing from local churches.

Nothing. We just want to equip them and provide for them free training, free resources to go to the abortion mills, to preach the gospel, to save lives, and to our local legislature to preach to them to demand immediate justice.

God has raised up nearly 500 local churches who are out saving lives on a daily basis. And we have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of children who are alive today because a church, honestly, not very much bigger than this.

Probably, actually, when we started, probably the same size as this church right here. Do you hear that? Same size. We went out and preached the gospel at the abortion mill. And as a result of it, God is now saving thousands of lives.

And now we have even legislation happening to criminalize, to end, and to abolish abortion. But here's what I need to share with you today, and this is so vitally important. We came here years ago. I was asked as a Reformed Baptist to preach at the family conference for the RP denomination, Reformed Presbyterian denomination, which is actually a really strange thing.

I was like, you know I'm Reformed Baptist, right? Yeah, we know. Okay, this is okay. Absolutely, I'll do that. That's an amazing gift. Absolutely. So I was coming, not for abortion, but just to preach this family conference on some other issues.

And while I was here, I learned that in the Republic of Ireland, it was still criminal to kill your child. And in Northern Ireland, it was still criminal. And I was praising God that the light of the gospel had so impacted Ireland that the Irish people are still able to hang on to the last vestiges of the Christian worldview and the blessings of justice and righteousness that are protecting the pre-born.

But I was very concerned because we were obviously on the very edge of it being decriminalized and legalized in really both places. And so we tried to spring into action to say, hey, let us encourage you as a church as to what you need to be saying in this context to hold back the slaughter of these innocent children.

And we worked and we tried. We were trying very hard to equip the church at the time. And of course, we know what's happened in the Republic itself and now in Northern Ireland. I was hoping to God. I was hoping to God that God would preserve your nation, that he would preserve you, that he would protect you from the evil of abortion.

I was hoping to God that we would not come back to teach you how to do abortion mill ministry. And that is where we are now at. And you need to hear something from me, from my heart as your brother. You have to tell the truth about this.

You have to be willing to lay your lives down for these pre-born children. You have to be honest about what it really is because, and this is a main point I hope you will get today, the American pro-life industry, the American pro-life lobby is a machine and it is a multi, multi, multi-million dollar industry and business that is now setting up in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

And the message of the American pro-life industry and lobby, please hear me on this, it pains me to say this, is not fundamentally Christian. It will not stand on the words of Jesus Christ. It pretends neutrality and at times denies, fundamentally denies, explicitly denies any connection to Christianity or to the biblical worldview.

And this is from the very top. The pro-life industry and the pro-life lobby will not call abortion what God calls it and that is murder. The unjustified killing of an image bearer of God according to God's word and God's standard is murder.

And the pro-life industry in my country, who's now coming over and influencing in yours, will not call it murder, will not be explicitly Christian, tries to take, quote, a backdoor approach and they are not working in my country for the ultimate abolition and criminalization and end of abortion now in immediate justice today.

They are working to regulate abortion. I'll give you some examples in my country as to what the pro-life movement sees as a victory in my country. They will start campaigns and they will raise millions and millions of dollars for a pro-life bill.

And these pro-life bills are touted as victories when they're passed. You want to hear about some of them? A pro-life victory bill is they force the abortion mill to have wider hallways. And they'll say we have a victory because we had a pro-life legislative effort passed.

Or they'll say something to the effect of, you are not allowed to kill a child using forceps. You can only use suction. And they'll call it a victory. They will raise from Christians, the Christian community or Roman Catholic community, they'll say we have a bill, it's going to save some lives.

And so they'll say no forceps, only suction. And then they will come out and they will praise themselves and pat their backs and put on medals saying look what we did. And in the end, consider the contrast.

Imagine if in Auschwitz we had Christians fighting for justice and they said look we had legislation passed that said you can no longer beat Jews to death. Now you can only use gas. Would we truly be circling Auschwitz raising our hands saying victory, victory?

No. Why? We all understand. Because they're murdering image bearers of God inside. Christians are called by God to hold back those who are going to death, who are going to the slaughter. It's the command of God in the book of Proverbs chapter 24.

God commands us to hold them back, to protect them. It's from God's word. That's what God calls us to, to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. And these pre-born image bearers of God are our neighbors.

And the pro-life industry, the pro-life lobby will not stand on the word of God to fight against this evil. And that is why they have failed. Brothers and sisters, please hear me. 50 years almost in my country, 62 million plus babies dead.

By the way, that number is completely wrong. I say 62 million plus because we're not even counting the abortifacient birth control pills that kill children in the womb. And we're not counting the plan B pills that women can go to Target or any other store to get and to kill their baby.

And nobody ever knows those numbers. There's really no way to ultimately calculate how many image bearers of God have been killed. Listen, we have Stalin. We have Hitler beat by the metric ton in my nation.

And it is something that we accept. We're standing on all of these dead children in my nation. And my plea to you as believers is do not have 50 years behind you of an anti-Christian worldview and movement fighting in your place so that you're standing on top of all of these dead bodies.

This is brothers and sisters. I know that you haven't had to face this yet, but it's a truth that you have to embrace and you've got to face it down. These are human beings who are being murdered. You see, we've been here before, haven't we?

We have. We truly have. In my country, we used to do what was considered in God's law a capital crime. We used to kidnap black human beings, pack them onto ships, and then put them into slavery and abuse them.

And this was just consensus. Well, I guess this is all right. I guess we just assume this is the way things are. We have to just accept this sort of a thing. Even though, in God's word, man-stealing and enslaving is worthy of death.

That was what God said about that. The just penalty for that is that. So how does God feel about kidnapping and enslaving? It's worthy of death. And we were doing it in my nation. It's accepted. People are just saying, well, that's just the way things are.

I guess this is part of our culture now. It's accepted. And they would look at black people in my country and they'd say, you know, I know it looks like a person. It's not a person. She's black. Same thing happened in Germany.

They'd say, I know it looks like a person. It's not a person. It's a Jew. You see, what we've done is we've dehumanized other image bearers of God at times in history. And do you know what's amazing about this?

Is it's only, please hear this, it is only the gospel and the biblical worldview that has ever done away with these evils in our world. Justice is established when God's people confront these evils in our cultures and societies.

And I will tell you this as we get into this, please hear me on this. For now, for the Irish people, I understand this. In Northern Ireland for now, this is, we've never experienced, we haven't experienced this.

We, this was criminal and now it's being forced upon us. And so, and now it's kind of theory, isn't it? Right? Like, well, in theory, they're going to be killing children and we should be doing this. And so there's not real flesh on this yet for you because you haven't had to taste it.

You haven't had to experience it as we have, but I want to encourage you with this. When you hold that first baby in your arms that was saved from death because you and your church, your local church, went to the abortion mill to preach the gospel and to love those people, when you hold that baby in your arms, it will change you.

It will change you forever. And my contention has always been from the very beginning. If you lay your life down on a daily basis and you go to that abortion mill and you go into the public square preaching the truth about abortion and God's truth about the gospel, you lay your life down and you're persecuted, maybe you're thrown into jail, maybe you're hated, maybe you're vilified by your culture, and you save one image bearer of God from death.

It is a life well lived. It is a life well lived. It's worth everything. You see, we've gotten to do that. You haven't. I've had two twins. I've had twin girls, Olivia Grace and Kara, girls who were saved from death at an abortion facility not far from us.

I've had them running around the front of my pulpit during service. Distracting, yes, but totally allowed, right? Right? You guys can run all you want. Olivia Grace and Kara, we've gotten to hold these little girls to kiss their heads, to hold their little fingers in our hands.

We've gotten to hold Carmelo in our arms, a little boy saved from death from Planned Parenthood in Glendale. You see, for us, there's flesh on this. You see, for us as American Christians, we've had to watch them have the dead bodies coming out of the abortion facility to go to Stericycle, where they're going to be burned up and destroyed.

You see, as American Christians, we've had to experience looking in the dumpster in the back of some of these facilities and seeing these dead bodies thrown away into the dumpster. You haven't experienced that yet, and I was hoping to God and His mercy, He would spare your nation from this judgment.

But I think we have to all admit, if our nations are facing this evil, our nations are under the judgment of God. When human beings can accept the murder of the most innocent among us, our nations are under judgment.

And I want to encourage you as my brother and sister to know that the only way that this darkness will dissipate is if the church rises up and obeys Jesus when He says that you are the salt and you are the light.

Salt, you see, I don't know how it is here. You guys don't use a lot of salt, so maybe you don't understand that. So all Americans are eating food over here. We're going, this is, it needs more butter and salt.

More fat, please, more fat and sugar. You see, we tend to think about salt when we see that today as, well, salt's the flavoring, right? It makes it taste better. So like maybe Christians, and I've heard people preach like this, and it is false.

When they narrow it into this, they say, you know, Christians are the salt of the earth. You make life have flavor, right? You can live your best life now, right? Big fake teeth, right? You know, you have the whole idea of like, you know, the Christians, we make, we give it the spice of life.

Like we make all things better. When you add Christians to something, it all is better. You're the tasty part of life. You're the salt of the earth. Let everyone see your light shine and see how great your life is, and cars, and house, and clothes, and whatever the case may be.

You're the salt of the earth, baby. Let them look and let them enjoy it, and that's what's going to draw people to Jesus. That's not what it meant in that culture. Salt was a preservative. There's no refrigeration.

So if you want something to last, you use salt for preservation, and so when Jesus says to his people, you're the salt of the earth, you stop things from spoil and decay. God's people. You're the light of the world is the light of God's people is shooting out into the world, and it's pushing back the darkness.

You see, I think we tend to think as Christians in the West, oddly, it wasn't the historic position of the church, that like, you know, we need to basically go into places and just get individual souls saved for heaven, which of course we do, but like the idea is like it's just about your private individual relationship with Jesus.

It's just a single person there, and let's have a Bible study in a basement. Like, that's the goal. Wasn't what Jesus said. Wasn't what he left us with. No, no, and Jesus said this in Matthew 28, 18 through 20.

He actually, as he ascends with some very confused disciples in front of him, right, a very small huddle of confused disciples, like this room, he said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been, past tense, given to me.

Now stop and just think about it for a second because we have to confess something as Christians. Oftentimes, we'll hear a verse so much, see a verse so much, that we know it by heart. We read it. We could even quote it together, but we haven't thought about all the implications of the passage itself.

We haven't actually bought it. We acquiesce to the fact of it. We say, it's true. I can check the box. I can do the online theological exam and win. I get all the points. I pass the test, but we haven't embraced the implications of it because we don't live like it's true.

Jesus says, all authority. Do you believe it? Do you believe that he's the king of kings, the Lord of lords? Do you believe that he's seated on his throne today, as the scripture says, putting all of his enemies under his feet?

Because he says, all authority, and that we look towards our culture, towards our rulers, our legislatures, and we assume, well, they don't necessarily have to obey his authority. He says, all authority in heaven, and every Christian goes, yes, amen.

Jesus is king over heaven. He's the boss there. Everything has to bow and yield to him in heaven. All authority in heaven, amen. But Jesus continues and says, and on earth, not will be given to me, has been given to me.

He says, go therefore, because this is true, because all the authority is mine in all the earth and in all of heaven. He says, go therefore and make disciples of all nations. Win the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And he says, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. You see, the goal of the great commission, the gospel, that call to go into the world, is to win the nations to Jesus, to disciple them, and to teach them to obey Jesus.

What's that have to do with abortion? Absolutely everything. You have to hear this. The pro-life movement will not, will not stand in the word of God. And their aim, their goal is not the gospel. It is not the glory of Jesus Christ.

It is not yielding to his authority. The aim of the pro-life industry and lobby in my country is neutrality. It is not standing on the word of God, believing what he says about the with the word of God as our foundation.

Now, don't get me wrong. Let me start with this. As I described that, you are pro-life. We are truly pro-life. We are for life, no compromise. But I want to encourage you not to allow us Christians, an industry formed in my nation that is not Christian, to come in and represent you as your voice.

This needs to come from the church of Jesus Christ. That's where this needs to come from. Believers just like you and just like me, with a prophetic witness in the culture with the word of God and the gospel on our lips.

You see, when Jesus said this, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, it wasn't a novelty. It wasn't as though the disciples like heard Jesus say it, and they were like, are you, what?

All authority? Go get all the nations? I've never heard such a thing. You see, this was actually the narrative that God had given to them all throughout the Old Testament. The Torah and the Tanakh had told this exact story, that the Messiah was going to come into the world and he was going to get the nations to obey him, to believe in him.

He was going to win Jew and Gentile together into one people, people from every tribe, tongue, language, all coming to the Messiah. That was the story. Daniel 7, 13 and 14. You know the story, right? Daniel looks in the night visions and what's he see?

One like a son of man coming on the clouds of heaven, and it says he comes up to the Ancient of Days and is presented before him, and it says to him is given, what? A kingdom, dominion, which will never pass away.

All the tribes, tongues, peoples, languages coming to worship him, to come to him. Well, of course, our Bibles open up with this promise in Genesis 49, 10. It starts in the beginning, brothers and sisters, that first book of the Bible, Genesis 49, 10.

There's a promise of one coming, and the name is Shiloh, and it says he's coming, and it says, and to him shall be the obedience of the nations, the obedience of the nations. That's the aim. That's the goal, the obedience of the nations.

Sound like Jesus? Sound like the Great Commission? Go get the nations, baptize them, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, teach them to obey. Genesis 49, 10. That's the aim of history. All the world are coming to believe in Jesus, salvation to the ends of the earth, the obedience of the nations, and brothers and sisters, Paul says it in Romans 1 and 16.

He bookends his systematic explanation of the gospel with that statement. Romans 1, Romans 16, bookended, that the purpose of all of this was to bring about the obedience of faith, or the obedience that comes from faith, among all the nations for the sake of his name.

You see, this is the aim of the gospel, to win the world to Jesus Christ, that they would come and bow to Jesus. Jesus is Lord. He's the ruler of the kings of the earth. We just sang it. It was in our songs in the beginning.

Again, hear the words, King, King, King. He's the ultimate. We sing about it all the time in church. We put it on Christian t-shirts, King of Kings, Lord of Lords. We put it on coffee mugs. We put it on posters and pictures and paintings.

And here's the question, do we really believe it? Because you see, Christians in history did believe it. When they would come into a nation, they'd come into sometimes an island with very hostile inhabitants, and the end goal was to win the entire island to Jesus Christ, not create a few converts.

You see, we had the mindset in history that it's about winning them and ultimately a submission to Christ's Lordship. The Hawaiian Islands. I don't know if you know this story. I told it last night. The Hawaiian Islands, 1820.

Some Puritan missionaries go over to the Hawaiian Islands. They're not Christian. They're the first missionaries there. And did you know that in 20 years of evangelization of the Hawaiian Islands, in 20 years, over 90 of the Hawaiian natives were professing faith in Jesus Christ.

And at the end of that mission work, in 20 years, they had a constitution of the Hawaiian Kingdom. You know what it said? You can go look it up on Google. Go look it up. The constitution of the Hawaiian Kingdom, 20 years of evangelism.