The false prophet has none of this, but he does have giftings, he is quite a speaker, and he is dynamic and he seems to have some sort of power about him. But know this, his character is the key. Does he bear fruit?

False prophets are known by two things: (1) the fruit that they bear and (2) the gospel they preach (Gal. 1).

You can just line up many of these TV preachers and just look at the fruit of their life (the way they live) and then look at the gospel that they supposedly preach and you can mark them off as false prophets. Immediately.

Now, he [Paul] says something unusual about them. He says that they are like wolves. (Acts 20:29) Their god is their belly. Their god is their belly. (Phil 3:19) But they look like sheep. Now how is that?

How is it that they look like sheep?

By their flattering smooth speech, which in an age of tolerance makes you think that they are the men most full of love.

They will never contradict

They will never create a scandal

They will never be offensive

They will never speak forth things to anger men

They have the smooth tongue of a serpent

They flatter men and give carnal men exactly what they want

Now let me tell you something about false teachers. You think so many times that people fall prey to false teachers and that, in a sense, can be true at times. But I think the dominant thing in scripture is just the opposite.

False teachers are God’s judgment on people who don’t want God, but in the name of religion plan on getting everything their carnal heart desires. That’s why a Joel Osteen is raised up. Those people that sit under him are not victims of him, he is the judgment of God upon them because they want exactly what he wants and its not GOD!

Let’s look for a minute at 2 Timothy. Chapter 4, verse 1-2.

“I solemnly charge you in the presence of God, and of Christ Jesus, Who is to judge the living and the dead and by His appearing and his kingdom; Preach the word…”

Now, when he says “preach the word” what is he saying? He follows it up with:

“Be ready in season and out of season to reprove, rebuke, exhort.”

Notice! That is NOT what these preachers do. As a matter of fact, they boast in the fact that they do not reprove, they do not rebuke – it is not their ministry. And why do they say it is not their ministry? They have a ministry of love, they say. Well then, are you saying that Christ didn’t have a ministry of love because He reproved and rebuked and exhorted and so did Paul.

But now look, verse 3.

“For time will come…”

This shows you that men are not so much victims of false prophets, as false prophets are the judgment of God upon men who don’t want God.

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine…”

Who won’t? The people! The religious people identified with Christianity – they will not endure sound doctrine! They can’t endure it! They hate it! Or it bores them to tears! And so what do they do?

“But wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers…”

I hope you know this, everyone in the world that is involved in Christianity knows that America is the birthplace of every heretical teaching on the face of the earth almost.

You know what my greatest fear is? My greatest fear is that the wall around Cuba is going to fall. You say, “Why would you fear that?” Because all of the heresy in the evangelical church will find its way into Cuba!

I go into countries sometimes and they will tell me this, “Go back into your country and tell them please don’t send anymore missionaries.” Look! We accumulate for ourselves teachers in accordance to our own desires! So, you get a Benny Hinn in there who tells you all you’re going to do is have a Mercedes Benz…those people aren’t victims, he is God’s judgment upon them! They want what he wants and so they accumulate him to themselves along with all those other teachers because they teach exactly what they want!

Why is that? Because a great many people who sit in Christian churches today hate God. You say, “What do you mean, they hate God?”

It’s like when preachers ask me many times,

“Would you please come and preach on the attributes of God? You’ve written a manual on it, we really like it; would you come an teach?”

I go, “Look, you probably don’t want that.”

Then they go, “What do you mean?!”

I go, “I just don’t want to divide your church.”

They go, “We’re Christian! You’re teaching about God! What do you mean divide your church!”

I say, “Listen to me, sir. When I start teaching the attributes of God and not Paul Washer’s version – I’ll just bring some historical, systematic theology to teach out of (all written by Presbyterians, Baptist don’t hardly write anything), but, I’ll bring them! And I’ll just read out of them, so you know I’m not inventing this stuff or it’s just my idea.”

“And if I preach the classical Christian view of who God is, in your church, it won’t take long for some of your finest members, especially among the elderly and especially among the women, will walk out of that church with their teeth clenched together and say My God is not that way! I could NEVER love a God like that!”

Because the god they’ve been worshipping is not the God of the Bible. It’s a figment of their own imagination. A god they made with their mind and then they worshipped what they made and he looks more like Santa Claus than He does Yahweh.

THAT’S what’s going on. The real God. Oh, C.S. Lewis was too tame when he said, “He is not a tame lion.” He’s God.  And I would not doubt there are people here and you don’t like Him. You wouldn’t like Him if you knew Him.

Know this, these false prophets are the judgment of God upon a wicked, defiled people, who although have a knowledge of God, they do not want Him. And so, God sends them the teachers that they themselves desire.

This transcript was taken from the video: Paul Washer on False Prophets.

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” Matthew 6:19-24

The previous is one of the most important passages in the Scriptures with regard to Christian priorities and missions. According to this Scripture, the Christian is to be on constant guard in order not to stray from eternal priorities. Two choices are always before us. One choice offers immediate rewards that are temporal and deceptive. The other is a narrow road which may cost us everything, but the rewards are eternal and beyond the ability of even Scripture to describe.

God’s Treasure

If we know that which is most treasured by God, then we will know that which should be most treasured by us – God’s treasure and ours should be the same. This is the very thing that made the life of Jesus so different from the life of every other man. He treasured only what His Father treasured. May God grant us the grace to do the same.

What is it that God most treasures? With only a cursory reading of the Scripture, we quickly discover that God’s priority is His own Glory. He desires that every aspect of His being, attributes, and works be made known to creation and that all praise and honor be ascribed only to Him. Consider the following Scriptures:

“For from the rising of the sun even to its setting, My name will be great among the nations.” Malachi 1:11

“Pray, then, in this way: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’” Matthew 6:9-10

It is God’s great desire or treasure to see His Name held in highest esteem among the nations, and among all creatures in heaven and on earth. At first sight, this may appear self-centered, but first sights are often very deceptive. For God to seek His glory above all else is the greatest demonstration of His love.

The depth of one’s love is often demonstrated by the costliness of the gift he/she gives. If someone was to give you a twig or a small fragment of gravel, it would not be an overwhelming demonstration of love. You would not rush out to alert the media, nor would you gather your friends about you to tell them of this great love that has been shown to you. It would not be something that you remembered very long, much less, that you held close to your heart all the days of your life. However, if someone gave his life that you might live, this would indeed warrant such a reaction. It would be a story worth the media’s attention, and your friends would most likely want to hear all about it. You would treasure such a selfless act of love all the days of your life. So then, the measure of one’s love is often manifested by the greatness of one’s gift.

Now we must ask ourselves a question: “What is the greatest gift that God could ever give?” It is not prosperity, health, or even heaven. He Himself is the greatest gift. The most loving thing that God can do for His creatures is to work in such a way so as to reveal or demonstrate the fullness of His glory to them – to take center stage and call all creatures to fix their eyes and hearts upon Him. For this very reason, when God does what He does for His own glory, it is the greatest demonstration of His love toward the creature.

The adverse of this is equally true. The most destitute and pitiful of all creatures are those who do not know God, who are unaware of His glory, and cut off from His truth. The

Scriptures declare that God has set eternity in the hearts of men (Ecclesiastes 3:11). This infinite aspect of the heart can only be filled by the infinite. Man may pour into his heart all the fame, wealth, power, and pleasure that this world has to offer, but he will still be empty. Eternity cannot be filled up with the temporal, nor can infinity be satisfied by the finite. Man’s heart was made for the full measure of God’s glory. Apart from this, man is destitute, miserable, and empty.

In summary, God’s treasure, His greatest desire and purpose is that His Name be great among the nations, that His Name be hallowed (highly esteemed), that His Kingdom come, and His will be done! However, we must ask ourselves, “Is this our greatest purpose and passion?”

We lay awake at night and worry about so many things. We fret and are anxious about so many things. We desire things passionately, fanatically, even to the point of obsession: houses and lands, jobs and promotions, fame and reputation, needs, and wants, and countless other things. But when was the last time that sleep escaped us because of our concern for the nations that have not heard? When was the last time that our hearts broke in two because there are places on this earth where God’s Name is not hallowed, His kingdom advances ever so slowly, and His will is not foremost in the hearts of men? We fret and sweat about so many things, but do we ever give any thought to that which is most on the mind of God?

Christ’s Warning

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.”

In this verse, Jesus is calling for a radical decision on the part of His disciples to repent of their earthly materialism and turn their hearts toward God and His kingdom. Although the

Scriptures speak of wealth as neither good nor bad, it does warn us that the love of wealth is a great evil (I Timothy 6:10) and that the seeking and hoarding of wealth will only lead to loss and shame on the day of judgment ( James 5:2-3).

Regardless of the warnings that run throughout Scripture, it seems that the desire for wealth is God’s greatest competitor for the hearts of men. It is ironic that although most people spend most of their time, “treasuring treasures,” very few ever really “possess treasures.” And those rare individuals who actually do obtain their treasures here on earth quickly grow tired of them once they are obtained. Is it not a very foolish thing to trade the glorious gifts of God for earthly treasures that we rarely do obtain, and if by chance we do obtain them, we quickly grow tired of them?

Name one thing on this earth that is highly coveted by men and we can quickly assess its true value with one simple question: “Is it eternal?” If it is, it is worthy of being obtained even at the expense of all other things. If not, its worth is equivalent to the dust into which it will turn. To seek for it is a pathetic waste of a human life and fool’s errand.

Christ’s Admonition

“But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal.”

The Scriptures do not speak against treasure or the pursuit of treasure, but it does speak against foolishly wasting the life God has given us in the vain pursuit of things that have no eternal value and can never fill the infinite desire of a heart made for eternity. In Isaiah 55:2, the Scripture shakes its head in bewilderment at men who seek for the temporal at the expense of the eternal:

“Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy?”

Nothing except the person and will of God can fill a man. The only treasure worth having is that which is eternal and comes from God. Such treasure is found only by doing His will, living for His glory, and seeking after His Kingdom. Has God not promised to care for us? Has He not promised to meet our every need? Has He not shown Himself capable and willing to fill His children with blessing and to not withhold from them one good thing? Why, then, do we put earthly pursuits ahead of the pursuit of God and God’s pursuits? Our one obligation is also our only means of truly living an abundant and satisfied life – “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness” (Matthew 6:33). Heaven and earth shall pass away, the inferior products of this world will burn up in the fire as hay, wood, and stubble (I Corinthians 3:12-15). However, the man who does the will of God will abide forever and his works will stand throughout eternity (I John 2:17). There will be no regrets in heaven for having lived “too much” for the kingdom of God, but we can be assured that there will be great regrets for having lived “so little.”

The Undeniable Truth

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Ever so often in Scripture, we are confronted by certain statements that open our hearts and reveal the truth about our character and desires. The verse above is one of those statements. Regardless of how often or forcefully we declare that God and His Kingdom are our greatest desire, the true desire of our life can be revealed by smallest and simplest of questions: Where is our heart? What occupies our thoughts above all other things? What do we long for? Can we say in truth that God and His Kingdom are our passion?

What if a stranger who did not know of our Christian confession watched our lives and read our thoughts? Would he be convinced that God and His Kingdom are our two greatest priorities? Would he hear almost constant conversation about the mercies of God and the advancement of His Kingdom? Would he hear us pray with passion for the unevangelized nations? Would he see us passing a sleepless night because God’s Name is not highly esteemed among all peoples,because His Kingdom has not covered the entire earth, or because His will is not obeyed or even known by the great majority of men?

If most were honest, we would be forced to admit that he would hear us speaking about houses and lands, cars and toys, recreations and hobbies. He would see us obsessed with worldly worries, wants, and pleasures. He would hear very little about God in our daily conversation, would see little activity directed toward the advancement of the Kingdom, and would think it preposterous for us to claimed that our treasure is in heaven!

Clear Eyes

“The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”

In saying that the “eye is the lamp of the body,” Jesus is not giving us instructions in human physiology, but rather is teaching us about the great influence that our desires have on our lives. Our body goes where our eyes are focused, and our eyes focus on what our heart desires. If our heart desires worldly things, then worldly things will be our focus and the very things we pursue. However, if our heart truly desires the things of God, then our eyes will be fixed on them, and we will pursue them with a passion. The clear eye has a single vision without confusion or duplicity. A.T. Robertson writes, “If our eyes are healthy, we see clearly and with a single focus. If the eyes are diseased (bad, evil), cross-eyed or cockeyed, we see double and confuse our vision. We keep one eye on the hoarded treasures of earth and roll the other proudly up to heaven” (Word Pictures).

As disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to singleness of heart and purpose. We are called to seek first the Kingdom of God and entrust all our worldly needs to the Master. He knows what we need before we ask Him and is disposed to do good things for His children.

Two Masters

“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

Jesus taught a great deal about money. The reason is simple – In this fallen world, money seems to be God’s greatest competitor for the hearts of men. If by grace, a man has freed himself from the love and pursuit of wealth, he has opened himself to the possibility of undivided devotion to God. Fallen man is a slave to someone. The question is not whether or not a man is a slave, but whose slave is he? Some men are enslaved to other men, some to themselves, and others to things such as money, security, and respectability. Other men are given to vain pursuits, deceitful pleasures, or something as“harmless” as a hobby. The list is almost endless, but Christ calls us to turn away from such slavery and turn wholeheartedly and without reservation to Him.

Although the above Scripture teaches us that it is IMPOSSIBLE to serve God and wealth, the application is far reaching. There can be no competitors in the heart of the believer.

We must constantly survey our lives and search out competing loyalties. When we find them, we must be careful to deal with them severely. We must not show them even the slightest compassion. If we spare them, they will become barbs in our eyes and thorns in our side (Numbers 33:55). We can never truly serve God while such things are hanging around our hearts. Even those things most precious to us must not be excused from our censure. Jesus taught that it is better for our right hand and right eye to suffer violent mutilation than for them to become stumbling blocks to the upward call of true discipleship (Matthew 5:29-30). We must put away anything that deters us from Him and His pursuits. Our lives are on the line and eternity is at stake! The Expositor’s Bible Commentary concludes:

“Both God and money are portrayed, not as employers, but as slave owners. A man may work for two employers; but since ‘single ownership and full time service are the very essence of slavery’ (Tasker), he cannot serve two slave owners. Either God is served with a single-eyed devotion, or he is not served at all. Attempts at divided loyalty betray, not partial commitment to discipleship, but deep-seated commitment to idolatry.”

For more resources, sermon downloads, and information,

visit www.heartcrymissionary.com

© 2008 HeartCry Missionary Society

From HeartCry Magazine, Volume 55, Published

October 2007.

Father, this night you know me and my great need of grace. Why am I here except that you called the weakest among men, the most ignoble among brothers and that by your grace, often times, the lesser teaches the greater? That is always my case and I praise you. I worship you. Father, help us tonight. To the wind with eloquence, to hell with the brilliant intellect, Father. Let the truth go forward. Let me be changed that the state of your Church be more glorious. I pray for grace upon grace and mercy upon mercy for myself and for thehearers who are present here. Help us, oh God, and we will be helped and we will boast in that help in Jesus’ name. Amen.

It is a great privilege for me to be here this evening, an astounding privilege to stand here before you and to speak about things such as revival, reformation, the working of God among his people and among men. But tonight I am going to share with you an indictment, an indictment, but it is an indictment of hope.

As I was praying through what I should do in this series of meetings I came to a great conclusion, a great burden that was laid upon my heart. We need revival. We need an awakening, but we cannot simply expect the Holy Spirit to come down and clean up all the mess we have made. We have clear direction from the Word of God with regard to what he has done through Christ, how he expects us to live, how he expects us to order his Church. And it does little good for men to cry out for extra biblical manifestation, when biblical principle is violated all around us.

I want you to know this. There is little need for the devil and evil men to oppose a man praying for revival unless he is also laboring for reformation. We have been given truth and we cannot simply do what is right in our own eyes and then expect the Holy Spirit to come down and bless our labors.

As we look into the Old Testament we see that Moses is given very, very detailed explanation how to build the temple. Now was that given for Moses’ sake or for the Church’s sake? I think that what is being explained here is that God is specific in his will and that we are not to presume that we can take the smallest detail and ignore it.

Now I know that I am frail man and I know that I am buffeted by many weaknesses, but I have an indictment and I can’t call it my indictment because who am I to indict anyone. And I dare not call it God’s indictment for how can I presume upon his name. But I will say this. As I look around at the Church and compare her to Scripture, I see that there are certain things that must change.

I am not Martin Luther. This is not 95 declarations nailed to Wittenburg’s door, but this is a burden on my heart and I must share it. I must share it.

Now let me say this. What I am going to say will anger some of you, but let me warn you. It may be true that you will be able to accuse me of arrogance. It may be true that you do not like my delivery. I have many times been arrogant and I have many times delivered truth in a wrong way, but don’t allow that to be an excuse for you. The question is. What I am saying, is it true whether it is delivered through a faulty messenger or no?

Others of you will be rejoicing in what you hear and you will want to say, “Amen,” and maybe pump your arms. But don’t do that because all of us bear a measure of guilt. And if you have attained to some spiritual state, then I would say what my brother has said. “What do you have that you have not received and if you have received it, why do you boast?”

Would it not be better to worship God in humility?

If you are a younger minister, I do not want you to get caught up in these truths and take them back and storm your church without love. I would make one suggestion. See to it that your knees are bleeding before you begin any sort of reformation. And if you are an older minister serving the Lord for many, many years I beg you not to be arrogant.

An old foolish king can learn from the weakest of his servants.

And also I beg you this. Have the courage to change everything even if it is the last day of your life, at least you can go into glory knowing that you attempted a reformation that was biblical.

And I will say this as a warning to the older men. Now, listen to me carefully. I know the admonition in 1 Timothy chapter five of the way I am to address you and so I address you this way, but there is a great awakening going on in this country and not only in this country and Europe where I have been and in South America and many other places, I see young men going back to the rock from which we were cut. They are reading Spurgeon and Whitefield. They are still listening to Ravenhill and Martin Lloyd-Jones and Tozer and Wesley and it is a great, incredible movement. Just because popular media and Christianity today hasn’t discovered what is going on, I want you to know that I would have never dreamed 15 years ago that I would see the awakening I am seeing, not through my ministry, but as I go to different places and see what God is doing without any of our ministries.

Whether it is Holland, a thousand young men declaring, “Things have to change,” crying out all night in prayer for the power of God and the truth of Scripture or South America recognizing that they have been so influenced by psychology and all sorts of superficial techniques coming from America with regard to evangelism and now weeping and broken are going back and evangelizing their churches, or the inner city of the United States where I have sat up at times until two and three in the morning discussing theology with young African Americans in the hood whom God is going to raise up to do more preaching than anyone will ever be able to imagine on this day.

There is an awakening.

And I am going to say this with tenderness. Most men over 40 don’t even have a clue about it. Many of the young people who are turning back to the old men and the old ways and to truths that have brought awakening time and time again in this world, most of these young men are quite young. And they will go to their pastors, they will go to their leaders and say, “Look at this, what we have discovered. Look what happened in Wales. Look what happened in Africa. Look at this and look at this and look at this teaching. It is absolutely amazing.”

And most of them will either turn it away or say, “It is nothing any different than what I have been preaching for 25 years,” when, in fact, it is completely different than what they have been preaching in 25 years.

And so we need to be very, very careful to understand that God is doing work. And he who began a good work will finish it.

Many people have the idea that they are going to pray in a revival. And other people say, “Revival will come whether you pray or not.”

I am not in either one of those camps. But I know this. When I see men and women and young people all over the world praying for an awakening, to me that is the first fruits of revival. And I can count on the fact that he who gave those first fruits will bring in the full harvest.

Now I want to look at 10 indictments, if we have time, things that I believe that we must change.

First of all, the first indictment: a practical denial of the sufficiency of Scripture, especially my denomination, a practical denial of the sufficiency of Scripture.

2 Timothy 3:15 and on says: And that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.

Over the last several decades there has been a mighty battle with regard to the inspiration of Scripture. Now some of you have not been a part of that battle, but many of us in more liberal denominations most certainly have, a battle for the Bible.

But there is only one problem. When you come to believe as a people that the Bible is inspired you have only fought half the battle because the question is not merely is the Bible inspired, is it inerrant. The major question following that that must be answered: Is the Bible sufficient or do we have to bring in every so called social science and cultural study in order to know how to run a church? That is a major question.

Social sciences, in my opinion, have taken precedent over the Word of God in such a way that most of us can’t even see it. It has so crept in to our Church, our evangelism and our missiology that you can barely call what we are doing Christian anymore. Psychology, anthropology, sociology have become primary influences in the Church.

Several years ago, many years ago when I was in seminary I remember a professor walked in and he started drawing footprints on the blackboard. And as he marched them across the blackboard then he turned to all of us and said only this. “Aristotle is walking through the halls of this institution. Beware, for I hear his footsteps more clearly than those of the apostle Paul and the team of inspired men who were with him and even the Lord Jesus Christ himself.”

We have come to believe that a man of God can deal in certain tiny areas in the life of the Church, but when it really gets tough we need to go to the social experts. That is an absolute lie. It says here in Scripture that the man of God may be equipped, adequate, equipped for every good work.

What does Jerusalem have to do with Rome? And what do we have to do with all these modern day social sciences that were actually created as a protest against the Word of God? And why is it that evangelism and missions and so called church growth is more shaped by the anthropologist, the sociologist and the Wall Street student who is up on every cultural trend?

All the activity in our church must be based upon the Word of God, all the activity in missions upon the Word of God.

Our missionary activity, our church activity, everything we do ought to flow from the theologian and the exegete, the man who opens up his Bible and only has one question. What is thy will, oh God?

We are not to send out questionnaires to carnal people to discover what kind of church they would attend. A church ought to be seeker friendly, but the church ought to recognize there is only one seeker. His name is God and if you want to be friendly to someone, if you want to accommodate someone, accommodate him and his glory whether it is rejected by everyone else. We are not called to build empires. We are not called to be accepted. We are called to glorify God.

And if you want the Church to be something other than a peculiar people, then you want something God does not want.

I want you to listen to Isaiah just for a moment, chapter eight. Listen to what he says. “When they say to you, ‘Consult the mediums and the spiritists who whisper and mutter…’” This is a perfect definition or at least illustration of the social scientists and the church growth gurus and everything else because every two or three years all their major theories change. Not only on what is a man or how you fix him, but what is a church and how you make it grow. Every two or three years there is another fad coming down the line of what can make your church into something super in the eyes of the world.

Just recently one of the greatest or most well known church growth experts said that he discovered that he was entirely wrong on all his theory. But instead of turning them to Scripture on his knees broken and weeping, he goes out to find another theory.

They give no clear word. It says here in Isaiah, “Should not a people consult their God? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living?”

Should we as churchmen, as preachers, as pastors, as Christians, should we go out and consult the spiritually dead on behalf of those whom the Holy Spirit has made alive? Absolutely not, absolutely not.

The second indictment: An ignorance of God.

At times I am asked, “Brother Paul, please come and do a week long series on the attributes of God.”

And many times I will say this. “I am… Well, brother, have you thought this through?”

He said, “What do you mean have I thought this through?”

“Well, it is quite controversial, the subject that you are putting… you are giving to go teach in your church.”

They say, “What do you mean it is controversial? I mean it is God. We are Christians. This is a church. What do mean it is controversial?”

I said, “Dear pastor, you listen to me. When I begin instructing your people on the justice of God, the sovereignty of God, the wrath of God, the supremacy of God, the glory of God, you are going to have some of your finest and oldest church members stand up and say something like this. ‘That is not my God. I could never love a God like that,’ because they have a god they have made with their own mind and they love what they have made.”

Jeremiah 9:23-24: Thus says the LORD, “Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches; but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me.

Psalms 50. “You thought,” God speaking: You thought that I was just like you; I will reprove you and state the case in order before your eyes. Now consider this, you who forget God, Or I will tear you to pieces, and there will be none to deliver.

Now, what is the problem here? There is a lack of the knowledge of God. Many of you, possibly think, “Oh, talking about the attributes of God and theology, it is all high, ivory tower stuff that has no practical application.”

Listen to yourself speak saying the knowledge of God has no practical [?]. Do you know why all your Christian bookstores are filled up with self help books and five ways to do that and six ways to be godly and 10 ways not to fall? Because people don’t know God. And so they have to be given all sorts of trivial little devices of the flesh to keep them walking as sheep ought to walk.

1 Corinthians 15:34. “Become sober-minded as you ought, and stop sinning; for some have no knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame.”

Why the rampant sinning even among God’s people? A lack of the knowledge of God, of God.

Now let me ask you a question. When was the last time you attended a conference on the attributes of God? When was the last time, as a pastor, you taught for a solid year on who God is? How much of all the teaching that goes on in America every week has anything to do with who God is?

And then we wonder. Isn’t it so easy to go with the flow, to just follow everybody else and then one day you hear something like this and all of the sudden you go, “I can’t even remember when anybody taught on the attributes of God”?

No wonder we are a people as we are.

To know him, that is what everything is about. That is eternal life. And eternal life doesn’t begin when you pass through the gates of glory. Eternal life begins with conversion. Eternal life is to know him. Do you honestly think you are going to be thrilled about swinging on gates of pearl and walking down streets of gold for an eternity? The reason why you won’t lose your mind in eternity is because of this.

There is one there who is infinite in glory and you will spend an eternity of eternities tracking him down and you will never get your arms even around the foothill of his mountain.

Start now. So many different things you want to know and do and all the books. Get out a book on God, this one, and study it to know him, to know him.

Sunday morning, because of all of this, I would submit to you that it would be better not even to have a Sunday morning. Sunday morning is the greatest hour of idolatry in the entire week of America because people are not worshipping the one true God—the great mass at least—but are worshipping a god formed out of their own hearts by their own flesh, satanic devices and worldly intelligence. They have made a god just like themselves and he looks more like Santa Claus than he does Yahweh.

There can be no fear of the Lord among us because there is no knowledge of the Lord among us.

The third indictment: A failure to address man’s malady.

When I look at the book of Romans which is one of my favorite books of the Bible, it is not a systematic theology, but if you could say any book in the Bible was a systematic theology the book of Romans would be the closest. Isn’t it amazing that Paul spends the first three chapters of that book seeking to do one thing? Bring all men into condemnation, bring all men into condemnation.

But it is not that condemnation is his great sunum bonum in his theology. It is not his end or his final purpose. It is a means to bring salvation to his readers because men must be brought to a knowledge of self before they surrender self over to God. Men are made in such a fallen manner now that you must cut away from them absolutely every hope in the flesh before they may be brought to God.

It is as important in everything, but it is especially important in evangelism. I remember. This was… I was 21 years old and had just been called to preach and I walked into an old store where they would sell suits to ministers for half price. They had been doing it for 50, 60 years. And I walked in there and I was looking for a suit in Paducah, Kentucky and all of the sudden the door opened. I heard the bell ring. It closed. There was an old, old man standing there. I never caught his name, but when he walked in he looked right at me.

He said, “Boy, you have been called to preach, haven’t you?”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

He was an old, old evangelist. He said, “You see where that building is right outside this building?”

I said, “Yeah.”

He said, “I used to preach there. The Spirit of God would come down and souls would be saved.”

I said, “Sir, please tell me about it.”

He said, “There wasn’t anything like this evangelism today.” He said, “We would preach for two and three weeks and give no invitation to sinful men. We would plow and plow and plow and plow the hearts of men until the Spirit of God began to work and break their hearts.”

I said, “Sir, how did you know when the Spirit of God was coming to break their hearts?”

And he said, “Well, let me just give you an example.” He said, “Many decades ago I walked into this store to buy a suit. Someone had handed me $30 and said, ‘Preacher, go buy you a suit tomorrow.’ And when I walked through the door the young clerk taking care of the shop turned around and looked at me and when he looked at me he fell down on the floor and cried out, ‘Who can save a wicked man like me?’ And I knew that the Spirit of God had fallen upon the place.”

Now we just walk in and talk to them, give them three exploratory questions and ask them if they want to pray a prayer and ask Jesus to come into their heart and we make a two fold son of hell who will never again be open to the gospel because the religious lie that we, as evangelicals, have spewed out of our mouth.

I will say something that Leonard Ravenhill used to say. “Now you understand why I preach in a lot of places once.” But that is the truth.

When we treat sin superficially, first of all we are fighting against the Holy Spirit. “And He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin.”

There are very popular preachers today who are more concerned about giving you your best life now then they are eternity. And they brag about the fact that they do not mention sin in their preaching. I can tell you this. The Holy Spirit has nothing to do with their ministry lest he be working against. That would be the only thing.

Why? When a man says he has no ministry dealing with the sin of men, the Holy Spirit does. It is a primary ministry of the Holy Spirit to come and convict the world of sin. And so know this. When you do not deal specifically, passionately, lovingly with men and their depraved condition, the Holy Spirit is nowhere around you.

Also we are deceivers when we deal with the malady of men lightly like shepherds of Jeremiah’s day. “They have healed the brokenness of My people superficially, Saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ But there is no peace.”

We are not only deceivers, but we are immoral, like a doctor who denies his Hippocratic oath because he doesn’t want to tell someone bad news because he thinks that person will be cross against him, will be angry with him, will be sad. And so he does not tell them the news most necessary to save their life.

I hear preachers today, they say, “No. No, no, no, no. You don’t understand, brother Paul. We are not like the people of the day of John and Charles Wesley. We are not like the culture that Whitefield addressed or Edwards. We are not as hearty as they are. We are broken. We don’t have as much self esteem. We are feeble. We can’t bear such preaching.”

Listen to me. Have you ever studied the lives of these men? What they preached their culture couldn’t bear it either. No one has ever been able to bear the preaching of the gospel. They will either turn against it with a fierceness of an animal or they will be converted.

And to give you a thing about us being more feeble and not having the self esteem, our country and this world is overrun with this disgusting malady of self esteem. Our greatest problem is that we esteem self more than we esteem God.

We are also thieves when we do not speak much about sin. We are thieves.

Let me ask you a question. This afternoon, this morning, where did all the stars go? Did some cosmic giant come by in a basket and pick them all up and throw them in and carry them someplace else? Where did all the stars go this morning? They were there, but you couldn’t see them. But then the sky grew darker and darker and darker and as that night turned black as pitch the stars came out in the fullness of their glory.

When you refuse to teach on the radical depravity of men it is an impossibility that you bring glory to God, his Christ and his cross because the cross of Jesus Christ and the glory thereof is most magnified when it is placed in front of the backdrop of our depravity.

She loved much because she has been forgiven much and she knew how much she had been forgiven because she knew how wicked she was.

Oh, we are afraid to tell men of their wickedness and they can never love God because of it. We have robbed them the opportunity to boast not in self, but to follow the admonition, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Our fourth indictment: An ignorance of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I want to submit to you tonight that this country is not gospel hardened. It is gospel ignorant because most of its preachers are. And let me repeat this. The malady in this country is not liberal politicians, the root of socialism, Hollywood or anything else. It is the so called evangelical pastor of our day and preacher of our day and evangelist of our day. That is where the malady is to be found. We do not know the gospel. We have taken the glorious gospel of our blessed God and reduced it down to four spiritual laws and five things God wants you to know with a little superstitious prayer at the end and if someone repeats it after us with enough sincerity we popishly declare them to be born again.

We have traded regeneration for decisionism.

First of all I am amazed after I talk about what I am going to talk about for just a few minutes here how many godly believers of 30 and 40 years walking in the faith come up to me with tears saying, “Brother Paul, I never heard this before in my life.” And yet it is the historical doctrine of redemption, of propitiation.

You see, when you talk about the gospel, my dear friend, let’s set it up just clearly. The gospel begins with nature of God and it goes from there to the nature of man and the fallenness thereof. And it goes from there, those two great columns of the gospel come to set up for us what should be called and known as, in every believer’s mouth, the great dilemma. And what is that dilemma? If God is just he cannot forgive you.

The greatest problem in all of Scripture is this. How can God be just and at the same time the justifier of wicked men, when Scripture throughout the Bible says—especially I will draw from one text in Proverbs—“He who justifies the wicked is an abomination to God.” And yet all our Christian songs boast about how God justifies the wicked.

That is the greatest problem. That is the acropolis of the Christian’s faith so said Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Charles Spurgeon and anyone else who has read Romans three. You see, you have got to fit this before people. The great problem is that God is truly just and all men are truly wicked, God to be just must condemn wicked man. But then God, for his own glory, put a great love with which he loved us, sent forth his Son who walked on this earth as a perfect man. And then according to the plan, the eternal plan of God, he went to that three. And on that tree he bore our sin and he became, standing in the law place of his people, bearing our guilt, he became a curse.

“Cursed is every man who does not abide by all the things written in the book of the law so as to perform them.”

Christ redeemed us from the curse becoming a curse in our place.

So many people have this romantic, powerless view of the gospel that the Christ is there hanging on the tree suffering under the wounds of the Roman Empire and the Father did not have the moral fortitude to bear the suffering of his Son so he turned away.

NO!!

He turned away because his Son became sin.

And so many when he is in that garden and he cries out, “Let this cup pass from Me,” people speculate, “Well, what was in the cup? Oh, it is the Roman cross. It is the whip. It is the nails. It is all this and all that.”

I do not want to take away from the physical sufferings of Christ on that tree, but the cup was the cup of God the Father’s wrath that had to be poured out on the Son. Someone had to die, bearing the guilt of God’s people, forsaken of God by his justice and crushed under the wrath of God, for it pleased the Lord to crush him.

I was in Germany a while back or in a Germanic seminary in Europe a while back and this book The Cross of Christ, now it wasn’t John Stott’s book, it was another. I pulled it off and began to read it and this is what it said. “The Father looked down from heaven at the suffering inflicted upon his Son by the hands of men and counted that as payment for our sin.”

That is heresy.

Now that physical suffering, that nailing to the tree, that was all part of the wrath of God. It had to be a blood sacrifice. I will take nothing away from that. But, my friend, if you stop there, you don’t have a gospel.

And let me ask you. When the gospel is preached today and when it is shared in personal evangelism today do you ever hear the things I have just said? Almost never. It is never made clear that Christ was able to redeem because he was crushed under the justice of God and having satisfied divine justice with his death God is now just and the justifier of the wicked.

Gospel reductionism. We wonder why it has no power. We wonder why… What happened? I’ll tell you. When you leave the gospel behind and there is no longer any power in your supposed gospel message, then you have got to go to all the little tricks of the trade that are so prominently used today to convert men and we all know most of them, all of them do not work.

My dear friend, let me say this. Several years ago graduating from seminary I had to make a decision whether I was going to go for my Ph.D. God, in order to save my spiritual life sent me to the middle of the jungles in Peru as far away from the academic world as I could get. And there I began to realize something.

As Spurgeon said, “Greater men with greater minds than I have approached this doctrine of the Second Coming, but to no avail. It is a great and mighty doctrine.” He said, “I will set myself to this: seeking to comprehend something of Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

Let me tell you this. This is what… It makes me so angry when men treat the glorious gospel of Christ as though it was the first step into Christianity that only takes about 10 minutes to counseling and after that you go on to greater stuff. That shows you how pathetic we are in our knowledge of the things of God.

My friend, on the day of the Second Coming you will understand absolutely everything about the Second Coming, but you will be in eternity of eternities in heaven and you will not even begin to comprehend the glory of God in Calvary. It is what everything is about.

Young man, young preacher, listen to me. Go after Him on that tree, what it means. You will need nothing to build strange fires in your oven, if you only catch a glimpse of what he did on that tree, what he did on that tree.

I love to say this. I have said it a million times. Abraham takes Isaac up that mountain, his son, his only son whom he loved. Do you suppose the Holy Spirit was trying to tell us about something future? And that son put up no struggle, but laid down and when that Father gave his will in to the will of God he brought that flint knife to pierce his own son’s heart. But his hand was stayed and it was told the old man that God had provided a ram.

So many Christians think, “Oh, what a beautiful end to that story.” It is not the end. It is the intermission. Thousands of years later God the Father laid his hand upon the brow of his Son, his only Son whom he loved and took the flint knife out of the hand of Abraham and slaughtered his only begotten Son under the full force of wrath.

Now do you know why that little gospel you preach has no power? Because it is no gospel. Get to the gospel. Spend your life on your knees. Get away from men. Study the cross.

The fifth indictment: An ignorance of the doctrine of regeneration, an ignorance of the doctrine of regeneration.

My dear friends, and I am going to say this bluntly, I know that there are Calvinists here and I know that there are Armenians here and I know that there are all sorts of strange animals in between, but I want you to know this. Although I am leaning more toward—I guess I call myself a five point Spurgeonist—I want you to know this. Calvinism is not the issue. Now, I am going to get in a lot of trouble when this goes on the internet. Calvinism is not the issue. I’ll tell you what the issue is. Regeneration. And that is why I can have fellowship with Wesley and Ravenhill and Tozer and all the rest because regardless of where they stood on the other issues they believed that salvation could not be manipulated by the preacher, that it was a magnificent work of the power of almighty God. And with them, therefore, I stand, that it was a work of God.

There is a greater manifestation of the power of God in the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit than in the creation of the world, of the universe, because he created the world ex nihilo out of nothing. But he recreates a man out of a corrupt mass.

It is paralleled with the very resurrection of our Savior from the dead. If you are a preacher I understand that in preaching there is teachers and preachers and expositors and this and that and all of them are very necessary for the health of the Church. But you must understand this. As old G. Campbell Morgan, I have heard of him that when he would go up that majestic tower to preach he would quote to himself, “As a lamb led to the slaughter, as a sheep before his shearers.” He knew that apart from a magnificent manifestation of the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, everything he said would be dead. It is the Spirit that gives life and in that sense every one of us who proclaims must proclaim as a prophet.

What do I mean by that? We are always, we are always Ezekiel standing in that valley of dry bones and they are very dry. And we walk out there and what do we do? We prophesy. We say, “Hear the Word of the Lord.” And we know that the wind of God must blow on these slain or they will not rise again. And when you have fully grasped that in the innermost part of your being, you will no longer give yourself to the manipulation that is so often carried out in the name of evangelism in this country. You will proclaim the Word of God. You will proclaim it.

The doctrine of regeneration. Look at the Wesleys. Look what they had to face for a moment and my dear Whitefield. What was he? Everybody believed they were Christian, thoroughly Christian. Why? Well, they were baptized as infants, brought into the covenant. They were confirmed. They lived like devils. Regeneration was traded for a type of credalism that was given authority by the religious leaders of the day.

And then here comes the Wesleys. No. It is not right with your soul. You are not born again. There is no evidence of spiritual life. Examine yourself. Test yourself to see if you are in the faith. Make your calling and election sure. “Ye must be born again.”

Here in America because of the last several years, several decades of evangelism the idea of born again is totally lost. It only means that at one time in a crusade you made a decision and you think you were sincere. But there is no evidence of a supernatural recreating work of the Holy Spirit in your life. If any man, not if some men, if any man be in Christ he is a new creature.

And now it is the same today. What do we face? I will tell you what we face. It is not a sort of infant baptism necessarily most of the time. It is not a high church confirmation by an ecclesiastical authority. What we face is the sinners’ prayer. And I am here to tell you, if there is anything I have declared war on it is that.

You say. “Brother Paul…”

Yes, in the same way that infant baptism, in my opinion, was the golden calf of the Reformation, for the Baptists and the Evangelicals and everyone else who has followed them today, I will tell you, that sinners’ prayer has sent more people to hell than anything on the face of the earth.

You say, “How can you say such a thing?”

Go with me to Scripture and show me, please. I would love you to stand up and tell me where anyone evangelized that way. The Scripture does not say that Jesus Christ came to the nation of Israel and said that “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand, now who would like to ask me into their hearts? I see that hand.”

That is not what it says. He said, “Repent and believe the gospel.”

Now men today are trusting in the fact that at least one time in their life they prayed a prayer and someone told them they were saved because they were sincere enough. And so in their salvation if you ask them, “Are you saved?” they do not say, “Yes, I am because I am looking unto Jesus and there is mighty evidence giving me assurance of being born again.”

No. They say, “One time in my life I prayed a prayer.”

And they live like devils. But they prayed a prayer. And some of them… I heard of one evangelist who was coaxing a man to do that thing. Finally the man felt so uncomfortable the evangelist said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I will pray to God for you and if it is what you want to say to God, squeeze my hands. Behold the power of God.”

Decisionism, the idolatry of decisionism. Men think they are going to heaven because they have judged the sincerity of their own decision.

When Paul came to the Church in Corinth he did not say to them, “Look, you are not living like Christians so let’s go back to that one moment in your life when you prayed that prayer and let’s see if you were sincere.”

No, he said this, “Test yourselves, examine yourselves to see if you are in the faith.”

Because I want you to know, my friends, salvation is by faith alone. It is a work of God. It is a grace upon grace upon grace. But the evidence of conversion is not just your examination of your sincerity at the moment of your conversion. It is the on going fruit in your life. It is the ongoing fruit in your life.

Oh, my dear friends, look what we have done. Isn’t a tree known by its fruit? What 60%, 70% of America thinks it is converted, born again. We kill how many thousands of babies a day? We are hated around the world for our immorality. Yet we are Christian.

And I lay this squarely, the blame, at the feet of the preacher.

Sixth indictment: An unbiblical gospel invitation.

We have touched on it a bit. I want to go further. Look how we do it today. I mean, now listen to me. The more… I have seen this everywhere. The Calvinist, the Arminian, a lot of them share something in common. It is this, the same superficial invitation. They talk a lot of talk about a lot of things and then they come to the invitation and it is almost as though everyone loses their mind.

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? Well, 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.

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 and 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.

After that we have exploratory questions. “Hey, you know you are a sinner, don’t you?”

That’s like years ago my mother died of cancer. It is like the doctor walking in and saying, “Hey, Barb, you know you got cancer, don’t you?”

We treat it so superficially. No weight, nothing solemn.

“Sir, there is a terrible malady upon you and a judgment coming.”

Because if you just tell a man, “Sir, you know, you are a sinner?” Go ask the devil if he knows he is a sinner.

He will say, “Well, yes, I am. A mighty good one at that… Or a mighty bad one depending on how you look at it. But, yes. I know I am a sinner.”

The question is not do you know you are a sinner. The question is: Is the Holy Spirit so at work in your heart through the preaching of the gospel that a change has been wrought so that the sin you once loved you now hate and the sin you once desired to embrace, you are wanting to run from it as though you were running from a dragon?

And then the question: Do you want to go to heaven?

This is the reason I would not let my children go to 98% of the Sunday schools and vacation Bible schools in evangelical churches because some well meaning person stands up and says, “Isn’t Jesus wonderful,” after showing the Jesus film.

“Yes.”

“How many of you little children love Jesus?”

“Oh, I do.”

“Who wants to accept Jesus into their little heart.”

“Oh, I do.”

And they get baptized. And they may walk a little bit because they have been…. They are being raised in a Christian culture, sort of, a church culture anyway. And then when they turn 15, 16, when they have the strength of will they begin to break the bonds. They begin to live in wickedness and then we go after them saying, “You are Christians. You are just not living like it. Stop your backsliding,” instead of going to them biblically and saying this. “You made a confession of faith in Christ. You professed him even in baptism, but now it seems as though you have turned away from him. Examine yourself. Test yourself. There is little evidence of any true conversion in you.”

And then when they are 24, 25, after college, maybe 30, they come back to church and they rededicate their life and they join right in with that pseudo Christian morality that encompasses churchianity in America and in the end they hear this: “Depart from me you worker of iniquity. I never knew you.”

You say, “Brother Paul, you are so angry.”

Have I not right to be? Somebody must be. Crying out for revival, but we haven’t even got the foundations straight.

Oh, that revival would come and straighten our foundations. But would we, while we have open eyes and open ears and have Scripture in front of us, should we not correct these things?

Would you like to go to heaven?

My dear friend, everybody wants to go to heaven. They just don’t want God to be there when they get there. The question is not do you want to go to heaven. The question is this. Do you want God? Have you stopped being a hater of God? Has Christ become precious to you? Do you desire him?

That is what political theory is all about, my dear friend. Everybody wants to go to heaven. But men are haters of God. So the question is not do you want to go to a special place where you will no longer hurt and you will get everything you want. The question is: Do you want him? Has Christ become precious to you?

Often as a person prays they are told after that, “Would you like to go to heaven?”

“Well, yes.”

“Well, then, would you like to pray and ask Jesus into your heart?” Now, my dear friend, let me say this. There are people who get saved using that methodology, but it is not because of it. It is in spite of it.

“Sir, do you desire Christ? Do you see your sin?”

“Oh, yes, yes, I do.”

“Sir, let’s look at a few Scriptures here that lay out for us what repentance looks like, the Spirit bearing witness that this is happening in your life. Do you see brokenness? Do you see the disintegration of everything you fought and now your mind is filled with new thoughts about God and new desires and new hope?”

“Yes, I see that.

“Sir, that may be the first fruits of repentance. Now, throw yourself upon Christ. Trust in him. Trust in him.”

And then listen to me. You have the authority to tell men the gospel. You have authority to tell men how to be saved and you have authority to teach men biblical principles of assurance. But you have no authority to tell men they are saved. That is the work of the Holy Spirit of God.

But when you take them through that little thing, “Did you ask Jesus into your heart?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think you were sincere?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think he saved you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course he saved you because you were sincere and he promised that if you asked him to come in, he would come in. So you are saved.”

And they walk out of the church after five minutes of counseling and the evangelist goes to Denny’s to eat, and the man is lost. The man is lost.

An unbiblical invitation. If they ever doubt, if they ever doubt their salvation again, here we go again. If they ever doubt their salvation, “Let’s go back to a point in time. Was there ever a point in time in your life when you prayed and asked Jesus to come in?”

“Yes.”

“Were you sincere?”

“I think so.”

“That’s the devil bothering you.”

And if they live without growth even in the context of a church without growth in continued carnality, no fear. We blame it on the lack of personal discipleship and we write it off as the doctrine of the carnal Christian.

The doctrine of the carnal Christian has destroyed more lives and sent more people to hell.

Do Christians struggle with sin? Yes. Can a Christian fall into sin? Absolutely. Can a Christian live in a continuous state of carnality all the days of his life not bearing fruit and truly be Christian? Absolutely not or every promise in the Old Testament regarding the New Testament covenant has failed and everything God said about discipline in Hebrews is a lie.

A tree is known by its fruit.

When we work with men in conversion… I have seen preachers who understood much about the things of God, but when they come down ever after an exemplary gospel presentation they will enter, once again, into this methodology.

Let me give you a story and then we will go on to the next indictment, but a story that is one of the most precious moments in my life as a Christian.

I was preaching in Canada just… Actually they told me it was like 30 kilometers from Alaska. There were more grizzly bears in the town than there were people, really. It was a little church of about 15, 20 people and I was preaching. And right when I got up in the pulpit this mountain of a man walked in in his 60s, early 70s, but just a mountain of a man. He could have whipped every one of us in this building.

And as I preached, as I saw his face, I just threw everything away and started preaching the gospel. He was the saddest human being I have ever seen. Just gospel, gospel and when I got done I walked right from the pulpit to him.

I said, “Sir, what is wrong. What is troubling your soul? I have never seen a man so sad and down hearted in all my life?”

And he pulled out a manila envelope and it had some x-rays which I couldn’t understand, but he said this. “I just came from the doctor. I am going to die in three weeks.” That is what he told me. “Now I have lived all my life on a working cattle ranch. You can only get there by float plane or riding horses across the mountains and all this stuff.” He said, “I have never been to church. I have never read a Bible. I believe there is a God and one time I heard somebody talking about some guy named Jesus.” He said, “I have never been afraid of anything in my life and I am terrified.”

I said, “Sir, did you understand the message, the gospel?”

He said, “Yes.”

Now what would have a great majority of preachers done at that moment?

“Well, would you like to ask Jesus to come into your heart?”

That is what they would have done.

I said, “Sir, you understood it.”

He said, “I understood it, but is that it? Is that just…” He said, “A child could have understood that. Anybody. Is that all it is that I understand it and I pray or…?”

I said, “Sir, you are going to die in three weeks. I have to leave tomorrow. I will cancel my plane ticket and we will stay here over the Scriptures wrestling and crying out to God until you are either converted or you die and go to hell.”

And so we began. I began in the Old Testament, the New Testament, every verse of Scripture dealing with the promises of God regarding redemption and salvation, over and over, time after time, reading John 3:16, praying for a while, crying out to God, questioning the man regarding repentance, regarding faith, regarding assurance, working till Christ be formed in him.

And then, finally, just exhausted that evening there was no breakthrough, there was nothing. And I said, “Sir, let’s pray.” And we prayed.

I said, “Sir, read John 3:16 again.”

He said, “We have read this a million times.”

I said, “I know, but it is one of the greatest promises of salvation. Read that text again.”

And I will never forget. He had my Bible on his lap in those big mountainous hands of his and he said, “Ok.” He said, “For God so loved the world, that He gave… I’m saved. I’m saved. Brother Paul, all my sins are gone. I have eternal… I’m saved. I mean…”

I said, “How do you know?”

He said, “Haven’t you ever read this verse before?”

What was going on? A working of the Spirit of God instead of those little tricks you try. What you want to go eat. What you think preaching is the spectacle and after that you go back to the hotel? No, after the preaching is when the work begins. Dealing with souls. People come forward in meetings they’re counseled by someone who shouldn’t be counseling. Five minutes, they are given the… Quick, give the card to the pastor and the pastor says, “I would like to present to you a new child of God. Welcome him into the family of God.”

How dare you?

If you are going to present him, say this. “This man tonight has made a profession of faith in Jesus Christ. And because of our fear of God and our love for the souls of men we will now be working with him to make sure that Christ has truly been formed in him, that he truly has a biblical understanding of repentance and faith and great assurance and joy in the Holy Spirit. That is what we are going to do.”

Look what we have done. I plead with you. Look what we are doing. And this is not some cult. This is us. Stop it. Stop it.

Seventh indictment: Ignorance regarding the nature of the Church.

God has only one religious institution. It is the Church. It is the Church. And our ultimate goal and the ultimate product of revival will be the planting of biblical churches.

I have the greatest fear that the local church today is despised. Tell somebody you are an itinerant preacher, that you have a world wide ministry and they all bow down. Tell someone you are a pastor of a group of 30 and they make you sit in the back during the conference.

He is not the prince of itinerant preachers, he is the prince of pastors.

Several years ago Bill Clinton had a slogan during the election. “It is the economy, stupid.” My pastor, Jeff Noblett, one of the elders in our church, the primary teaching, preaching pastor, he said to me one day, he goes, “You know, I’d like to have a bunch of shirts made up.”

“What would they say, brother Jeff?”

“It’s the Church, stupid.”

Jesus gave his life for the Church, a beautiful virgin, pristine Church. If you want to give your life for something in the ministry, give it to the Church, to a church, a body of believers, a local congregation. It is the Church.

Now let me say this about the Church. I want you to listen well. There is not a remnant of believers in the Church. We all know about the remnant theology, you know, that throughout all the course of Israel there was Israel the people of God and a remnant of true believers. That is not true about the Church. There is not a remnant of believers or a small group of believers inside a larger group called the Church. The Church is the remnant.

And I want to say this. If pastors have ever come to close to blaspheming it is with regard to this. I hear theologians, itinerant teachers, pastors, this and that saying these sorts of things. “There is just as much sin in the Church as out of the Church. There is just as much divorce in the Church as out of the Church. There is just as much immorality and pornography in the Church as out of the Church.” And then preachers say, “Yes, the Church is acting like a whore.”

I want you to know this. You ought to be very careful calling the bride of Jesus Christ a whore.

I will tell you what the problem is. Pastors and preachers don’t know what the Church is. I want you to know that the Church of Jesus Christ in America is beautiful. She is frail at times. She is weak. She is buffeted. She is not perfect, but I want you to know she is broken. She is humbly walking with her God. The problem with you is you don’t know what the Church is.

Today because of the lack of biblical preaching the so called Church is filled up with carnal, wicked people identified with Christianity. And then because of all the goats in the midst of the lambs, the lambs are blamed for all the things the goats are doing and then the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of us.

Have you ever read… Let’s just…. I know we are running out of time, but just go quickly with me, just go quickly. I want to show you something. Go to Jeremiah 31, thank you. Verse 31 of Jeremiah 31. “‘Behold, days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.’”

Now I do not want to take away anything from the people called Israel, but this text is also applied to the Church. Understand that. I don’t want to get into any battles on eschatology, but in the Bible, in the New Testament, the book of Hebrews it is applied to the people of God.

“Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.”

I hear preachers saying all the time, “Well, when you look back and you see Israel, you see a bunch of godless, idolaters, people. And in the midst of them there was a tiny remnant of true believers.” That is true, but don’t apply that to the New Testament Church because he says, “I am going to do something different.

Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD.

“But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the LORD, “I will put My law within them.”

He hasn’t just given you, if you are converted, he hasn’t just given you a stone tablet of laws. He has supernaturally, through the doctrine of regeneration, written those laws in your heart. And because he has done that, “I will be their God, and they shall be My people.”

And look what it says. “”They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,’ declares the LORD, ‘for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.’”

Again, the doctrine of regeneration. God is doing a new work these last 2000 years. We don’t have a lot of churches in America. We have a lot of really nice brick buildings on finely manicured lawns.

Just because someone says they are of the Church or they are Christian doesn’t make it so. Look what he says. They will not even have to teach one another.

Now that doesn’t mean there won’t be teachers and preachers, but there will all be an outstanding knowledge of God among them, particularly with regard to their sins having been forgiven.

Quickly just jump. Look at 32, chapter 32 verse 38. “They shall be My people, and I will be their God.” He doesn’t say, “I hope so, maybe, if I get lucky, oh, if I can get enough evangelists to work with me, maybe this will all come out right.”

He says, “I am going to pull a people for me, a people that I am going to give to my Son.” And he says, “They shall be My people, and I will be their God.”

Look at this. “And I will give them one heart and one way.”

Now, don’t be angry with me, any angrier than you already are at least. But listen to me. The 70s and 80s and all the Jesus marches and everyone weeping and crying, “The Church is so divided. The Church is not one.”

My dear friend, let me tell you something. If the Church is not one there is a prayer out there that God the Father did not answer for his Son. And this new covenant promise has failed.

So I want to redirect you a little bit. I want to submit to you, the Church is one. She has always been one.

Have you ever sat down on an airplane or maybe met someone in a marketplace you didn’t even know and you being maybe Baptist or Mennonite or this or that, but truly evangelical, truly Christian, you talk to him for no more than few minutes and you discover, “He is a believer. This is a live one.”

And at that moment you would give your life for him. You would give your life for him.

I remember one time we were in Departamento Amazonas in Peru and it was during the time of the Sendero Luminoso and the civil war that was going on there. We rode 22 hours up in the back of a grain truck under a black tarp and at about midnight we pulled the tarp off, the truck stopped and we jumped off into the jungle. We stayed the night just at the edge of the jungle and made our ways up to a place called [?]. About half way up we got lost in the dark the next day so we were praying, me and my dear friend Paco, we were praying, “Oh, God, give us some direction. We are lost. If we are found in here the terrorists own the place. The military wouldn’t even go in.” We cried out, “Oh, God, give us some direction. Help us.”

We heard a bell. And then we heard somebody talking. It was a strange conversation at first we thought. Then we realized it was a little boy coming in from the fields with his burro and he was talking to his burro. And so we got behind him and we followed him. Then we stood on the edge of the town, a little village, huts, adobe homes and I said, “Paco,” I said, “You know, if terrorists own this thing we are dead.”

“Yeah, but we have got to somewhere.”

So we got down, walked up to a man who was drunk in the dark and said, [?] “Are there brothers here?” Because everybody knows what that means in the mountains? It means a real Christian.

And he said, [?], “The old woman over there.”

So I went over there. There was an old Nazarene woman and I knocked on the door. I said, “I am an evangelical pastor. Please help me.”

That old woman reached out with that lantern. She grabbed me. She pulled me inside. She grabbed Paco, took us down. Her house was cut out of a kind of a cliff in the mud and took us down in the basement where there was some hay and chickens and things and she sat us there and she lit a lamp and then a little boy came in and she called to him and said, “Go get the other brothers.” And they started bringing chickens and yucca and everything else, risking their life. Why? Because we are one.

Stop saying all these silly things that you are saying, that the body of Christ is divided and it is a mess and it is full of sin. I would not talk about the bride of Christ that way if I was you.

What you have got is a bunch of goats and tares among the sheep. And because very little biblical, compassionate Church discipline is practiced, they live among the sheep, they feed on the sheep and they destroy the sheep and those of you who are leaders in the Church are going to pay a high penalty when you stand before the one who loves them because you did not have enough courage to stand up and confront the wicked.

As a matter of fact, listen to me. The average scenario in North America with regard to churches by and large, the churches are democracies. And I don’t want to get into the ifs and pros or cons of that. But here is what happens. Because the preaching of the gospel is so low, the church is basically the majority of it are carnal lost people and because it is a democracy they by and large govern the direction of the church. And because the pastor doesn’t want to lose the great number of people and because he has wrong ideas regarding evangelism and true conversion, he caters to the wicked in his church and his little group of true sheep that belong to Jesus Christ are sitting there in the midst of all the theater, in the midst of all the worldliness, in the midst of all the multimedia going, “We just want to worship Jesus and we just want someone to teach us the Bible.” And pastors are going to pay for that.

I have…. It is true. It is just true.

You are saying, “Oh, you are just angry.”

My dear friends, do you know what it costs me to say this? It is true. Trying to keep together a bunch of wicked people while a little flock in the midst of them are starving to death and are made to go in directions they don’t want to go with the carnal majority.

Listen to me. If my wife was at Walmart late one night and you walked by as a man and you saw that two men were abusing her, three, four, five, ten men were abusing her and hurting her and you put your head down in the name of self preservation and you walked by, I want to tell you something, my friend. I will not only look for those 10 men, I will look for you.

It is the bride of Christ and she is precious to him. It is going to cost you to serve Jesus. It could cost you your church, your reputation and your denomination, absolutely everything. But the bride of Jesus Christ is worth it.

Look what it says. I love this. Look, 39. “I will give them one heart and one way.” And what is that way? It is Christ and it is holiness.

Every true believer I have ever met spoke much of Christ and had a longing desire to be more holy than they were, more conformed to Christ. And, look. “I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear Me always, for their own good and for the good of their children after them.”

Oh, what a text that is. But let’s just go on really quickly. “I will make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn away from them, to do them good.”

Now, we just read this and so many people who are wicked, who are lost, they just go to church on Sunday. They hear this verse. “Yes, God has made an everlasting covenant with me. He will never turn away from me, never, never. I am secure because of God’s grace.” But they fail to read the second part.

And look what it says. “I will make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; and I will put the fear of Me in their hearts so that they will not turn away from Me.”

The evidence that God has made an everlasting covenant with you, sir, is that he has put the fear of God in you so that you will not turn away from him and if you turn away from him and he does not discipline you and you continue turning away from him, it is evidence that he has not put his fear in you, you have not been regenerated and you have no covenant with God at all.

Oh, it’s true.

The eighth indictment—and we will just rush through this—and I know that this is misunderstood today and so I am going to define it: A lack of loving and compassionate Church discipline.

Most evangelical pastors in America today ought to take Matthew 18 and rip it right out of their Bible.

You can’t do that, sir. You have got to take the whole thing.

Many pastors, their theology gets left behind when they come out of their office, out of their study. They are theological in conversation. They are theological in their office, but when they step out, they run the church by carnal means.

I am not an elder at my church and so—and have not been there very long—so I can say this without boasting. It practices church discipline. It is a very large church, about 1000. And they estimated they have saved 30 marriages in the last several years through loving, compassionate church discipline that does not begin with excommunication. It begins with, “Ye who are spiritual…”

We say, “Oh, I am too loving. We can’t practice discipline. We just… we are just too loving.”

You are more loving that Jesus? He is the one who commanded this.

“Yeah, it will cause so much problems.”

Yeah, you’re right. Maybe that’s why there’s not a whole lot of problems between the church and culture today because we are not confronting culture.

And we don’t confront culture just by going out there and picketing Hollywood. We confront culture by obeying God. Noah built the ark and condemned the world. You don’t have to have a protest sign. Just walk in obedience and the world will hate you.

My dear friend, “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother.” Oh, what a wonderful thing. “But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed.”

It is not that these guys are on your side. They are going to listen and judge. Maybe you are the one that is wrong. Maybe your brother is not in sin. Maybe you are overcritical and legalistic. Who knows?

And listen. “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

My dear friend, I believe that we need to hear this. We can either start obeying God and disciplining ourselves or we can have God do it for us. And maybe the hour is coming and now is when that is going to happen.

I am not talking about critical, legalistic, hateful men. There’s enough of those. I am talking about a man, a group of elders, leaders who love enough to lay their life on the line because they know this is not a game. This is not something that we do just for this life, that eternity is at stake, the salvation of souls. Look at all these Christian bookstores. Look at the old books of the old days of the Wesleys and the Whitefields and on and on, the Puritans and the Reformation. Most of those books dealt with what is the gospel, how do you preach it, how do you bring someone to Christ, how do you discern true conversion, how do you be a doctor of souls.

We have joined Rome in this matter. Rome: The baby is baptized, the baby is Christian. The baby is Rome’s. Never again deal with conversion. Just create all sorts of worldly means to try to keep them in the Church.

Evangelicals have done the same. Pray a little prayer with them after two or three minutes of counseling, after a half an hour of preaching, 25 of which was very funny stories and then drawing the net after five minutes. Counsel them for a little bit and then declare them saved and then spend the rest of their days discipling them and wondering why they don’t grow.

I want to submit to you, I believe in personal one on one discipleship, but, my dear friend, the Church got along for a thousand or more years without it, without what we know as personal, one on one, discipleship with all the books and all the different things.

I want you to think about this. One on one discipleship became gigantic in the late 70s and until today. What was the cry? Just as many people are going out the back doors, coming in the front door and the reason why that is happening is because we are not discipling people.

No. The reason why it is happening is because people aren’t getting converted, because his sheep, they hear his voice and they follow him, whether you disciple them or not.

Now we ought to disciple, but that is not why they are leaving. They went out from us because they were not of us. And they hardly got a chance to be of us because they never heard a true gospel and no one ever dealt with their soul.

So we spend a fortune discipling goats, hoping they will become sheep. You can’t teach a goat into a sheep. A goat becomes a sheep by the supernatural working of the Spirit of almighty God.

Now Church discipline… I moved my family to this church because they practice Church discipline, because I need to be under Church discipline, the watchful care of elders and other members who take this seriously. I want my children, if they are converted one day, they are all tiny right now, but if they are converted or they make a profession of faith and then go awry, I want to know that my children will be brought before the Church, if necessary for the salvation of their soul.

Some of you in here would get so mad if a pastor walked up to you and said, “Honestly, I have been praying about your child and I fear that they are unconverted.”

You would get so mad you would rally up a group to have that pastor kicked out instead of realizing, “Oh, praise God, we have got a man of God here.”

Ninth indictment: A silence on separation.

There is a void of serious teaching about holiness. My dear friend, general teaching on holiness, everyone agrees. Let’s be holy. We need to be more holy. Let’s have a holiness conference.

But when you get specific about what that means, that’s when everything turns into a turmoil.

“Pursue peace with all men,” the writer of Hebrews tells us, “and sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.”

Does anybody believe this?

You say, “Brother Paul, I have been blamed so often for teaching, you know, works religion.”

Listen to me. Listen. Again, it goes back to regeneration and the providence of God. If God truly converts a man he will continue working in that man, through teaching and blessing and admonition and discipline. He will see to it that the work he has begun will be finished. And that is why the writer says, “Without sanctification, without holiness no one will see the Lord.”

Why? Because if there is no growth in holiness, God is not working in your life. If he is not working in your life it is because you are not a child.

Look at the difference between Jacob and Esau. “Jacob I loved…Esau I hated.” Yet God fulfilled all his promises to both of them. Jacob was blessed. Esau was blessed. How did God demonstrate his judgments and wrath against Esau and his love toward Jacob? I will tell you how. He let Jacob run wild. He let Esau run wild, no work of discipline, no work of godliness, nothing. But he beat Jacob to death almost every day of his life.

The loving discipline, the correction of God to bring us to holiness.

Now there is so much teaching on this, but let me just say this. “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice.” Romans 12:1 and then go on to two.

Your bodies. Why does he say “body?” I think to avoid all this super spirituality.

“Well, I have given Jesus my heart and you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Well, as a matter of fact, you can judge a book by its cover. Jesus never said you couldn’t just a book by his cover. He said you could. “You will know them by their fruit.”

And if you think that you have given him your heart, then he will have your body. And I will tell you why. The heart, my friend, is not some blood pumping muscle or some figment of a poet’s imagination. It refers to the very essence or core of your being. Don’t tell me Jesus has the very essence and core of your being and it doesn’t affect your body. It is just not going to happen.

And so what do we do? We go through Scripture, what, legalistically? No, drawing inferences? No. Just standing on the commands of Scripture.

About what?

I do not agree with everything the Puritans said, but I love the Puritans and one of the reason why I love them because I believe they honestly made an attempt to bring everything in their life under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Their minds, because they wrote 800 page books on what should I think about according to the Scriptures. What should not enter into my mind according to the Scriptures? What should I do with my eyes? What should go in these ears and what should not go in these ears? How should the tongue be ruled? What should be the direction of my life?

And yes, I am going to scare you to death. How should I dress?

Now here I am going to be careful here. I don’t want to draw inferences and things. My dear friend, my wife says it this way. If your clothing is a frame for your face from which the glory of Christ springs forth, it is of God. But if your clothing is a frame for your body, it is sensual and God hates it. Enough said?

Now I can’t go through everything of holiness and holiness isn’t just outward expression, but we have become to be a people that uses the interior work of the Spirit as an excuse to say nothing is ever going to happen on the outside. And that is not true.

Some of you young men, you cry out probably more than I do that the Spirit of God would fill you and work in you, but it only takes one half hour of television to so grieve him, he will be miles from you.

Ninety-nine percent pure, 1% sewer I am not drinking.

One time I was struggling and Leonard Ravenhill was talking to a dear friend of mine who was saying, “Brother Leonard, a young man, brother Paul, he is really struggling.” And he sent a tract. I still got that tract. I will never, never part with that. It said, “Others can, you cannot.”

I don’t necessarily agree with everything.

Young man, listen to me. I don’t go to malls. I don’t, not because I am more holy than you. It is because I know what I am.

There is the story of one of the finest, greatest violinists in Europe playing his final concert, an old man. And when he finished a young man walked up to him, violinist and said, “Sir, I’d give my life to play like you.”

And the old man said, “Son, I have given my life to play like me.”

“I want the power of God on my life.” Then something has got to go.

“I want to know him.” Then some separation has to occur.

Let me tell you something, young man, everyone else is running around, all their little retreats and all their conferences and getting together with group hugs and singing Kumbayah and everything else. Maybe you need to get alone in the wilderness with God and fast for seven days on your knees studying the book of Psalms, just being alone with God, belonging to him.

To be a man of God there has got to be a sense where sometimes even your wife who is of your own flesh, one with her, she looks you in the eye and she knows she can’t go where you are going.

There is silence on separation. I think, “Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness?” Nothing. “Or what fellowship has light with darkness?” Nothing. Darkness is the opposite of God’s revelation.

At what harmony Christ [?]. Nothing. Or what has the believer in common with the unbeliever? Nothing.

He says, “Come out from their midst.” Come out from the midst of what? Come out from the midst of lawlessness, darkness, satanic devices and the life and worldliness of the unbeliever. Come out from it.

I have a tenth indictment and this is very important to me as an older man with a young family. I didn’t get married until I was thirty. My wife had something of a little brain tumor for the first eight years. We couldn’t have children and then, oh, praise God, a child was born and then another and then another and then, who knows?

Psychology and sociology have replaced the Scriptures with regard to the family.

My dear friend, pastors, leaders, think about this. Our churches or our Sunday morning services—better said—are so cosmetic. Just because there seems to be beautiful worship and the sermon went well and people seem to be moved, that is not evidence. I will tell you what evidence is. The home, the marriages, the families.

Judges 17:6. “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

If I talk to people because I go for all kinds, I find a godly man who has raised godly children and I go and I latch on to him. But in most cases do you know what I find out? The people I talk to in church all of it is wife’s tales and sociology and this and that and every other thing, what is right in their own eyes and can’t give me one biblical verse. But every once in a while I find a man and a woman who set themselves to set their family according to Scripture and the difference is overwhelming.

When I am on an airplane I love to do this. Men will sit down beside me and they will go, “What do you do?”

I go, “Oh, I’m a husband.”

They go, “Oh, what else do you do?”

“Oh, I’m a father.”

“What else do you do?”

“Well, if I have any time left over I preach a little.”

What does it matter if a man win the whole world and lose his family? And let me just put it to you this way. Based upon what are you raising your children and loving your wife? Based upon what? If you can’t start going into Scriptures right now and pulling them apart and showing me how your family is founded upon it, I can assure you, you are a captive of psychology, sociology, the whims and the lies of this age.

You see, you don’t have the right to do… You have no authority, sir, apart from the Word of God.

Look at Genesis 18:19. “For I have chosen him, so that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that the LORD may bring upon Abraham what He has spoken about him.” What a beautiful thing?

And listen, Romans chapter 12 verses one and two. Well, verse two tells us that the will of God is perfect. So if you ever come up with this idea as a man of God, “I am sacrificing my family for the sake of the ministry,” I will tell you, you are a bald faced liar. You are sacrificing your family for the sake of the little kingdom you are trying to build because the will of God is perfect. That means I do not have to violate the will of God with regard to my family in order to fulfill the will of God with regard to the ministry.

God doesn’t need you. He does desire that you be obedient, that you be obedient.

I just want to give you two examples. Now before… It is like when someone asked me one time, “Brother Paul, are you against evangelism?”

I said, “Yes and no. I am not against biblical evangelism, but I am against the way you are doing it.”

“Are you against Sunday school and youth groups?”

“Yes and no.”

I want to explain something to you. Now, for some of you I am not going to be enough and for some of you I am going to be too much. I just want to use these two things to point out what is wrong with us.

Sunday school. No matter what denomination you are a part of, if you are a part of some denomination that is kind of organized I can assure you that your denomination spends multi millions of dollars on Sunday school material, multi millions of dollars on conferences, on teaching teachers how to teach Sunday school, on doing everything in the book to promote Sunday school. I know that for a fact.

Let me ask you. How much money does your denomination spend and how many conference and man hours are put in to teach fathers to teach their children? So now you have found it, haven’t you? God doesn’t have a plan B. He has a plan A. You circumvent plan A, plan B won’t work.

Now I am not saying that children can’t come together in groups and be catechized or be taught or anything, but if that ever even begins to hint to supplant the ministry of the Father in the home, blow it to pieces.

Do you see what I am saying? Look at just that one tiny instance. Everything for Sunday school, everything for Sunday school. But there is hardly a conference in this entire country to teach men how to teach their children. And most of the time in the Sunday school it is nothing more than entertainment because the Sunday school teacher doesn’t have the authority to discipline your child. And even if they did they wouldn’t do it because they don’t believe in it.

That’s just one tiny instance. Let’s look at youth groups.

“Well, youth need to be together. You know, they need to be together.”

Ok, well, let’s look. Proverbs 13:20. “He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will suffer harm.”

Who ever told you youth ought to be together? Who ever told you that? I’ll tell you who told you that. 1960s psychologists, generation gap. Youth are to be with adults so that they stop acting like naïve fools and join adulthood and put away foolishness which leads to destruction.

Now I am not saying you can’t bring youth together, but I submit if you do, have all their parents there.

And you say, “Well, what about the lost youth that come into our church?”

Well, what are they seeing now? The lost youth come in to your Christian youth in Church and they see almost the same thing they see in their own home, no parents, kids teaching kids. Or one guy a little bit older with mousse in his hair teaching your kids.

But what would happen if lost youth came into your church and they saw the children there, the youth in a loving, wonderful relationship collectively with their parents and they would go, “Whoa. I have never seen anything like this before. His dad, look at him. He loves…I mean he loves his dad. I mean look at the… So is this Christianity?”

You see, my dear friend, let us say… I am no doctor, but a man comes up to me with a bleeding forehead and he says, “Brother Paul, I have been everywhere. No one can diagnose my problem.”

And I say, “Well, I am no doctor, but I’ll follow you around for 24 hours.”

And I notice that every time the hour strikes if it strikes one he hits himself in the head with a brick one time. If it strikes two he hits himself in the head twice with a brick. If it strikes 12, he hits himself 12 times in the head with a brick.

After observing this, cautiously and carefully, taking notes for 24 hours, I come up to him and I say, “You know, I think I have figured out your problem. I am no doctor, but I think I have figured out your problem.”

It is that pathetic among us, church. Why do our children do what they do? Why is everything…?

It is like one old dear saint, someone asked him one time, he wouldn’t let his teenage son go out with a young lady to be in some private place. And they said, “Don’t you trust your son?”

He said, “No, I don’t trust my son. What ever made you think that? I don’t trust his dad. I wouldn’t put his father alone with a woman that wasn’t his wife and yet I have much more to lose than boy. I have much more control of my will than a teenager with raging hormones. So what would you… What would make you ever think I would do that?”

We violate biblical principle after biblical principle after biblical principle and then we wonder why everything is a mess.

Lastly, just real quick turn with me… You know when I say real quick I am speaking an allegory or something. Go to 1 Timothy. I was listening a few months ago to all the horrendous things that are happening to our—I don’t know what you would call them anymore: republic, democracy, country, I am not really sure, socialistic state—and I was so burdened as I sat there listening and I was saying, “Oh, God, what can I do? I would, right now, Lord, honestly with all that is in me I will jump in the middle of the fire. I will… If there is a charging rhino I will jump in front of it. Just tell me what to do. Do you want me to go to Washington and just stand in front of the White House and preach until they throw me in jail? I am tired of just preaching to Christians and in churches and all of this. God, just… The country is going to hell. Just throw me. What do you want me to do? Just throw me at them.”

Verse one of chapter four. “But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith,” 1 Timothy 4:1, “paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons.”

Now, he goes on to basically tell young Timothy that all hell is going to break lose in culture, that everything is just going to be maddening, men as beasts.

I was with Conrad and Mbewe a few months ago and I heard him preach. They call him the Spurgeon of Africa and rightly so. If you get a chance to listen to him, listen to him. He is one of my favorite preachers in the world. And he said this.

He said, “In Africa we no longer fear of beasts. We don’t run from beasts. We fear men and run from men.” He was talking, of course, about depravity.

But he said here that, “Just the world is going to come unglued, Timothy.”

Now what does he say, too? Verse six. “In pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith.”

And right there this text just started unraveling for me. Paul, yeah. The world has lost its mind. Everything is going to happen. It is under my providence, but listen to me. Here should be your reaction in the midst of all hell breaking loose, in the midst of apostasy, in the midst of persecution. Here is what you need to do. Be constantly nourished on the words of faith.

We always want to run out there and do something. We want to fix something. God is seeking men of character, polished, swords. First of all, son, be “constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine which you have been following.”

This “you have been following” is very important. I think it is indicating to us that a simple intellectual study of Scripture will not, will not achieve the goal that God has for his men. They must obey it. They must begin following. You cannot learn doctrine well until you follow the doctrine you learn.

And then he says this. He says, “But have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women.”

My dear friend, let me tell you something. All this Emergent Church stuff, much of the Church Growth stuff, all of the cultural sensitivity, throwing out the window biblical sensitivity, it is just a bunch of little boys wanting to play church without the power of God on their life. And I will stand on that statement.

It is a lesser than David trying to fit himself in Saul’s armor. To the wind with it.

The more you trust in the arm of the flesh, the less you are going to see of the power of God.

He says this, “On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness.”

Man of God, you want revival. So do I. We need an army, though. If powerful swords, if mighty, flaming pipes and swords and weaponry are to be dropped out of heaven for us to fight, then we must be the caliber of men who can yield those things and wield those things and fight with them with sound character. We should discipline ourselves for the purpose of godliness.

Young men, discipline yourself to prayer. Discipline yourself to the systematic reading of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation over and over and over and over again. Discipline yourself in your speech. Discipline yourself in the company you keep. Discipline yourself in when you go to bed and when you rise up. This is a war. Discipline yourself.

Young men, I can tell you this. Unless you are some exception, being born in the age that you have been born, if you are under 30, yea, even under 40, you probably lack discipline because you have never been able to work. You have never had need to work for your food and your fathers never made you work so hard that your bones cried.

The men who have accomplished much and been used of God have been men of labor in the ministry. This is hard and it will cost you everything.

And by the time you are an old man you will be broken, but strong in the things of God.

Discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness; for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. Oh, my dear friends, who cares about your best life now?

Eternity! The day you stand in those granite halls before the Lord of glory and kings and the greatest men on earth are divided and split and culled, some cast into eternal hell and some invited into eternal glory live for eternity.

These Olympians, how majestic they are, but only for a moment. They start training when they are four and five years old. They never do anything but train until they are 22. They run a nine second race for a medal they hang up and that’s it.

Cannot you give equal for eternal things?

Some of the greatest men of God have been men very limited in their bodies. In their abilities they were so limited that they had to focus themselves into one thing. It is the ministry.

“For bodily discipline is only of little profit.”

It is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance. For it is for this we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God.

This is not some martyr thing in which we uselessly give our lives to nothing only to be pulverized without hope. No. We serve God and God will honor us. We have fixed our hope on that and that gives us strength, strength.

Oh this life is a vapor. I am 47, but yesterday I was 21. Where did it all go? It is a vapor.

While you have strength, preach. I praise God that in his providence as a young man I spent myself in the Andes Mountains and in the jungles of Peru doing what I no longer have the strength to do. While you are a young man, while there is strength in you, labor with all your might. Take those stupid video games of yours and crush them under your feet. Throw the TV out the window. You were made for greater things than these.

If you are a child of the king nothing on this earth can satisfy you, nothing.

“Prescribe and teach these things.”

Now, there is so much here, but look at 15. “Take pains with these things; be absorbed in them, so that your progress will be evident to all.”

Let’s say that on a wooden table my child spills a glass of water. And by the consistencies of nature, the laws that God has placed in her, the water heaps up a bit on the table, so much that you can see it as a pool. You walk by it and you say, “There is water spilled on the table.” It is evident to all.

But then I come by and I take a towel and I lay it across the spilled pool of water and I lift it up.

And you say, “I no longer see any water. Where is it?” It is absorbed in the towel.

Men, you are to be absorbed in these things of godliness and character. Men, I plead with you. Listen to me. This is so important. You are not errand boys. You are not to spend your days wiping the noses of carnal churchmen. Get yourself in your study. Drink deep. Be so absorbed in the knowledge and the knowing of God that people say, “Where is he? He used to be such a man about town, such a friend to everyone, such a personable fellow. Where is he?”

He is absorbed in these things.

We are men of God. We are ministers of the most high. There should be an otherness about us. We should have a distant gaze in our eyes towards a distant [?]. The greatest thing we can do for our people is to be men of God absorbed in the things of God so that when we open our mouths the Word of God comes out.

Where I go to church Jeff Noblett is the main preaching pastor. He has always given himself to study, but when I got there I talked to him and I talked to other leaders. And any time someone asked me something I said this. “Please do this one thing. Take as much of the burden off of brother Noblett as we possibly can and let him live in that study with God because I have got children out here. And the greatest gift that man could give to me is to study to show himself approved and to come out in that pulpit in the power of the Holy Spirit and proclaim, ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ correcting and rebuking, giving great promises and warnings. Please do that for me.”

Pastor, please do that for your people because he says, “Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching; persevere in these things, for as you do this you will ensure salvation both for yourself and for those who hear you.”

I want… Let’s just finish with this. This verse means almost nothing in the evangelical community today. How many pastors do you think and preachers take it seriously, “I need to pay close attention to myself to insure salvation for me and for those who hear me”?

I have a question, pastor, when was the last time you examined your own life to see if you were in the faith,

*** video resumes here:

to see if you really know him.

You see, my dear friend, I have great assurance when I study my own conversion, when I discuss it with other men, when I look over the twenty-five years of my pilgrimage with Christ, I have great assurance of having come to know him.

But even now, if I were to depart from the faith, and walk away, and keep going in that direction, into heresy, into worldliness, it could be the greatest of proofs that I never knew him. That the whole thing was a work of the flesh.

I know what I am saying is outstanding to you. You think, oh my, I have never heard such a thing, this is the old…read Pilgrim’s Progress.

Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching and preserve in these things, for as you do this, you will ensure salvation both for yourself and for those who hear you. May God Bless His Church.

For more info about Paul Washer go to: http://www.heartcrymissionary.com

I’m going to preach a message tonight that has angered many, many, many churchmen. It has angered many of the older people. It has angered many of the youth. Many of the youth that I’ve preached this to have become fiercely angry, but the people that have become most angry at hearing this message have been the parents of youth.

I have found that there is something quite amazing among parents that, if they can get some sort of a claim out of their children that they profess faith in Jesus Christ, they seem to hold onto that and it gives them assurance and joy, and it seems that they’re bothered any time someone would come and question that claim. It seems we would rather hold onto a false hope than to hear the truth.

There are many people who do not want to hear the truth because it will shake up the false hope they have that they’re going to heaven when, indeed, they are not. There are so many people in Christianity—American Christianity—that believe themselves right with God, that believe themselves saved because they were told that by a preacher who should have spent more time studying the Bible and less time preaching.

I hear people all over the world—and especially in this country—tell me that they’re saved, and I ask them how do they know that they’re saved. Well, because they believe. And no one asked them the second question: How do you know that you believe?

If we were to dismiss this congregation tonight and send everyone out to every part of this city, we would find out that the great majority of the people in this city believe that they believe. And we know that’s not true. If we were to go to taverns and crack houses tonight, if we were to go to casinos anywhere in this world, we would find people who believe that they believe. And the question is—how can we be sure that we believe when so many people say they believe and we know they don’t.

In America, we have combined two doctrines, and we have lost both of them. There are two very important doctrines in the Christian faith. The first one is commonly called—a name I do not like but I will use here tonight—the security of the believer, that every person who has truly believed in Jesus Christ is born again and they are secure. The very God who saved them will keep them saved––security of the believer.

But there’s another doctrine which we do not hear much about. It’s not just the doctrine of security, but the doctrine of assurance. It is true that every true believer is kept by the power of God. That’s the doctrine of security, but the doctrine of assurance is this: How can you be assured that you’re a true believer? How can you know that you are a true believer?

I’ve had people tell me, “Well, I just know that I know.” I tell them there’s a way that seems right unto men. It leads to death.

I’ve had people tell me, “Well, I know in my heart of hearts that I am saved.” The Bible says that the heart is deceitfully wicked. It goes beyond knowledge in its wickedness. So, do you really want to trust a mind that is faulty? Do you really want to trust a heart that can be wicked?

I’ve even had people tell me, “Well, I know I’m saved because the preacher told me I’m saved.” Since when did men have such authority?

And, then, the worst of all—“I know I’m saved because I have walked with God.” My dear friends let me tell you this, if you are not walking with God now, you can have no assurance that you have ever been saved.

We’re not teaching here tonight that, if you walk with God and you’re saved and then you stop walking with God, you lose your salvation. What we’re telling you is this—we have assurance that we have come to know Him not just because one time we repented, but we are continuing to repent today. It is not just that at one time we believed, but that we are continuing to believe today. It is not just that one time we walked with Him; we continue to walk with Him today because He who began a good work will finish it.

It says in 2nd Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 5, Paul had come to a church, many of them professing Christ, many of them walking in carnality, and he doesn’t ask them—he doesn’t say to them, “Let me ask you something. When was the time that you first asked Jesus Christ into your heart?” He didn’t even refer to their conversion experience. He goes right to present tense and he says this: Test yourselves—in verse 5—to see if you are in the faith. Examine yourselves. Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you unless indeed you fail the test.

If I see someone who, let’s say, for three or four years seems to have walked with God, loved the saints, endeavored to pray, to know the Word, to congregate with other believers, and all of such, and then they begin to fall away gradually. They begin to walk away. They begin to allow the world and sin and other things into their life. They begin to enjoy the fellowship of the wicked.

I don’t go to them and tell them, “You know you’re a Christian and you need to avoid backsliding.”

I go to them and say, “You have made the good profession. You have declared among many that you are a believer, but now you are beginning to live like an unbeliever. It is very, very possible you never knew Him, that up until this point, it has all been a very deceiving work of the flesh, because, if a work of God does not continue, it never was a work of God.

Now what does Paul say to this person? He says, Test yourselves. Test yourselves. Take a test.

Let me tell you something, my dear friends. Heaven and hell, eternity and death may not be very much a reality to you, but it most certainly is to this preacher. I could care less whether or not your bank account is balanced or you have self-esteem. My only thing––the only thing that might keep me up this evening and steal sleep from my eyes is the fact that many of you will die and go to hell.

Test yourself! This is not just some whimsical thing. This is not just something to worry about for a day. We’re talking about eternity. Is it well with your soul? If you test yourselves in the light of Scripture, will you be found whole and complete, born again, kept by the power of God?

It’s time to take a test and stop relying on your emotions and stop relying on what everyone is telling you and stop comparing yourself to other people who call themselves Christians, because the great majority of people in America who call themselves Christians are lost.

Some leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention have said this: If we take seriously what the Bible says about Christianity, we would have to say that less than 10 to 15 percent of all our membership is even saved. And don’t think that just applies to Southern Baptists. It applies to you all.

He said test yourself. Examine yourself. Not just some light examination. Not just hear the words of this preacher and walk out there and allow Satan to steal the Word of God from your heart. While you’re here and while Christ is present and while the Word is preached, examine yourself. It is a deadly thing. Sin waits outside this door. It is crouching and its desire is to have you. While you are here and Christ is present, examine yourself.

So many times in South America, working in the Andes Mountains, I would have to cross footbridges––gorges that you almost couldn’t see to the bottom. Test the ropes. Test the wood. Is this a sound bridge? Examine it carefully. Why? You get out in the middle of that thing, it breaks, you’re dead. In the same way, that salvation that you hold onto, that you trust in, it might be like a horse’s hair. When you swing out into eternity, many of you are going to swing out on nothing stronger than a horse’s hair and when the fires of hell blast up, you’ll wither and you’ll fall.

Examine yourself. Take the Word of God and what the Word of God says about a true Christian, and examine yourself in light of it. And if you fall short of the test, repent and believe. Throw yourself upon the mercy of God. Cry out to Him until a work is done. And that’s another thing, isn’t it? A whole other sermon. Until a work is done.

This silly Christianity in America. “Repeat these words after me.” No, you might have to wait upon God. You might have to cry out to Him until the work is done—a true work, a finished work, a complete work.

How can we take a test? How can we test our life? How can you test yourself tonight to see whether or not you truly are a Christian? We just have to go to the Word of God to do that.

Go to 1st John chapter 5. First John chapter 5, verse 13. John gives us the reason in his Gospel.

In John chapter 20, verse 31, he tells us why he writes his Gospel. He writes his Gospel so that men might believe that Jesus is the Son of God, that He’s the Christ, that they might have eternal life. Why does he write his epistle? He tells us here in 1st John chapter 5, verse 13: These things––this epistle––I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God––those of you who profess Christ––why?––that you may know that you have eternal life.

You want to know whether or not you’re born again? Read the book of 1st John, because the book of 1st John is made up of a series of tests, and we’re going to take those tests this evening. And I pray to God that God gives you ears to hear.

And I want to tell you something and I want to make it very, very clear. Do not listen to your heart. Listen to the Word of God. Do not listen to what your daddy says about your salvation. Do not listen to what your mother says about your salvation. Listen to the Word of God.

Compare what you know about your secret life.

Now, what did I say that for? So many of you young people, you have your parents so deceived it’s unbelievable, because externally you conform to their law, but it’s not your law. It’s not in your heart. And in the secret place, you know who you are. And then some of you who are not children, but adults, teenagers that are older that are out in the world, you go out there. You know who you are. Your mom and dad, they do not know.

Some of you adults, church members do not know, but when you are out there by yourself, that’s the person I want you to compare to the Word of God tonight. Not the one in here that looks pretty, not the one in here that’s got religious makeup on. No. The one out there when no one is looking. You take that person and compare him tonight to the Word of God and see if he stands. See if he stands.

You say, “Brother Paul, you seem quite intense tonight.” How would you expect me to be if a train––a slow-moving train was going across our path and to see my little boy just inches from the wheel. Would you expect for me to whisper in his ear, “Back up, boy.” Would you expect for me just to not even make a commotion, but kind of motion with my hand? Or would you expect me to scream out, “No-o-o-o-o-o!” How would you expect me to preach about these things?

Let’s take that secret life of yours and compare it to the Word of God.

First John chapter 1, verse 5. This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.

What does that mean? As in all the writings of John, he leaves things open. He leaves things open. I believe that, as you look through this text, you will find out that there are two things John is saying. First of all, whenever we’re talking about light, and we see this in John chapter 3, we’re talking about holiness, righteousness. God is a holy God. He is a righteous God, has no sin, no flaw, no shadow, no speck of immorality in Him. God cannot be tempted. You can be tempted because there’s still an element of evil in you that is drawn to evil. God has no evil in Him. Evil cannot draw Him. He disdains it. He despises it. He’s holy.

But that’s not, I think, John’s primary meaning here. John is dealing with a group of false teachers who basically are telling everybody that God is a very dark and shadowy and hidden figure, and that knowledge about God is esoteric. It is hidden and dark and only some people know it. And I believe that John is contradicting these false prophets and he is saying this, and you listen very carefully. This is what he is saying.

He’s saying God is Light. And he means this: God has revealed to us who He is and He has revealed to us His will. He has made it very clear.

Now, let me just say something about how that would change everything in America if the media truly believed that. What kind of God do we have in America? What is the god of the politician in America? It’s this kind of god––it’s a god you can pray to, but you cannot define who he is. It’s a god you can talk about in a political speech, but you cannot define what his will is. And that’s a good god to have. Why? Because you’re no longer accountable to a god like that. You don’t know who he is and you don’t know what he wants, so you just do whatever your carnal, wicked heart wants to do. That’s a very convenient god, and that’s the kind of god some supposed Christians have.

But John counters that and he says this: No, my friend, God has told you exactly who He is and God has told you exactly what He requires of thee, old man. He’s not a hidden god.

Now, learning that, let’s go to the next verse.

He says this: If we say that we have fellowship with Him. . . . What does that mean? If we say that we are saved is exactly what it means. If we say that we know Him, if we say that we abide in Him.

For so many years in America, because of a certain seminary that has propagated this, we have been taught and led to believe that 1st John is talking about the difference between a

Christian who walks in communion with God or a Christian that does not walk in communion with God. They take this text to mean that, if we say that we know Him, if we say that we know Him, if we say that we know Him and yet walk in darkness, we’re just a confused Christian. That’s not what this text means.

What this text is saying is this: If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. If we say that we are a Christian and yet we walk in darkness, we are lying.

Now, I know what’s going to happen in your heart right now. “Yeah, but you don’t know my heart, Brother Paul. I know that I know that I know that I’m saved.”

I could care less, again, about your heart. Because that’s not what John said. John says, if we say that we have fellowship with God, that we are a Christian and yet we walk in the darkness, we are a liar.

Now, what does it mean to walk in the darkness? Well, first of all, you need to understand what darkness is. It’s the opposite of light. If we say we are a Christian and yet we walk—now what does it mean to walk––peripateo––to walk around; a style of life. If we say we are a Christian and yet our style of life contradicts everything God has told us about Himself and contradicts God’s will, we’re a liar. That’s what it means. That’s what this text is saying. It’s as clear as a bell.

Now, listen to me. Listen to me. I’m going to tell you again. Look at this, in verse 6. If we say that we have fellowship with Him––if we say that we are Christian and yet we walk—we lead a style of life––in the darkness, we lead a style of life that contradicts the attributes and the nature of God, what God has told us about Himself, our style of life reflects nothing of God’s character, and our style of life totally contradicts what God has said to be His will, then we are a liar when we say we are a Christian.

We’ve got to understand this. Do you have ears? You’ve got to understand it. There are so many people walking around. You can see them. It is like a fog over their heads. That is why religion is so dangerous. All these silly little boys out here preaching that, if you repeat a prayer, you’re going to heaven and the moment they pronounce that upon a person, it is like a fog comes over them. But it’s time to cut through that fog with a deeper, greater light. And that is the Word of God.

My dear friend, listen to me. John is saying that, if you say you’re a Christian and yet your style of life, the way you are, does not reflect His character and the things you do go against His will as a style of life, he’s telling you, you are a liar when you say you’re a Christian.

Now, let’s go on. Here’s the next test. Verse 8. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now, he said, if we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.

There have been strains of Christianity or marginal Christianity down through the history of the church that believed in sinless perfection. Well, the Bible doesn’t teach that. The Bible teaches that even the most mature, the most godly Christian is still susceptible to sin.

What this is teaching us is this. One of the greatest evidences that a person has truly been born again, that a person is truly a child of God is that they will be sensitive to the sin in their life and they will be led to repentance and confession of that sin.

Isn’t it amazing—and most pastors, when I preach this, they smile. They know exactly what I’m talking about. Whenever I’m preaching in a church and there is a move of God and a move of God with regard to sin, I find it amazing that, when people start breaking and in American churches somebody is coming forward and praying, I think it is quite amazing that it is always the most godly, most devoted, most spiritual people coming forward, weeping over their sin and it is always the most carnal, godless, hateful, spiteful, wicked church members that sit back there, cold as a stone, as though they were perfect. What you are seeing is the difference between the lost and the saved in the congregation.

A true Christian is sensitive to sin. Sensitive to sin. Sensitive to sin. Let me ask you a question.

When was the last time you wept over your sin? That’s frightening. When was the last time you were broken over your sin? That’s frightening. Some of you don’t even know what I’m talking about.

When we are a child of God, God guards us. He talks about his jealous love for Israel. Is it not greater for the church? Does God guard you?

I can remember my great love for books in seminary, and I went to the bookstore there in seminary to buy a book with a friend of mine, and there were only two volumes left. There were two and there were two of us. I pulled out the first volume, and I love books, and there was a little tear on one of the pages. I swapped books with him. I gave him that book and pulled out the other one. We go to the counter. We buy our books. I go home the whole time as though I had murdered a man—as though I had murdered a man. And, finally, praying, having to call him up, saying, “I’ve got to talk to you.” “Well, what is it? You can tell me over the phone.” “No, I can’t tell you over the phone. I have got to meet you face to face.” And then go before him, weeping, and ask forgiveness. Why? Because I’m pious? No. Because God guards his children.

I see Christians, and it’s amazing to me. . . .”Brother Paul, come and preach for us.

We want revival.” And yet, before they come to the meetings and after the meetings they go home and sit in front of a television and watch all that filth. And they’re not even sensitive to the sin of it.

Are you sensitive to sin? Does it lead you to confession? Now, let me ask you, some of you here, here’s something you need to understand. Just recently a man that I know was found in grievous, grievous sin, and someone said, “How did a man like him fall into sin?”And I said, “He didn’t fall into sin. No man falls into sin. He slid there like everyone else.”

Let me ask you—because some of you may be Christians and you need to hear a warning. Are you sliding into sin? Are you starting to do things now, gradually, gradually, that you would not have thought of doing a month ago? And little by little by little, you know what’s going to happen? You keep going, and it’ll be evidence you’re lost. If God pulls you back, it’ll be evidence you’re saved.

You say, “Oh, Brother Paul, but you don’t know me.” I don’t need to know you. I know the Word of God, and I know it’s the same for every individual. Are you sensitive to sin?

I want to read a passage to you just quickly. Just listen. It’s one of my–to me it’s one of the most blessed passages in all of Scripture. Let me ask you, is this your attitude? Has it ever been your attitude?

God says, For my hand made all these things, thus all these things came into being, declares the Lord, but to this one I will look, to him who is humble and contrite of spirit and trembles at my word.

Do you tremble at His Word or do you look for loopholes around it?

Do you excuse your sin?

Do you avoid the Word now because you know it’s going to talk to you and talk about you?

People come to me all the time and say, “Brother Paul, I have a new relationship with God.”

And I go to 1st John, chapter 1, verse 8. I say, “Do you have a new relationship with sin?

Because, if you don’t have a new relationship with sin, you don’t have a new relationship with God.” Are you sensitive to sin?

Now, third test. It’s found in verse 3 of chapter 2. By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. Now, listen to this. The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

Now, let’s look at this test—by this we know that we have come to know Him.

You know, in America––I tell you what, I was talking to a Scotsman awhile back in Peru, and he said, “You Americans, your theology is 3,000 miles wide and a half inch deep.” He’s right. Our Gospel here is pathetic. Our evangelism borderlines on heresy.

How do you know that you came to know Him? If you go to most pastors in this city right now and you say to them, “I don’t know whether or not I’m saved,” this is the question they’ll ask you: “Was there ever a point in time in your life when you prayed and asked Jesus to come into your heart?” If you say yes, they’ll go, “Were you sincere?” If you say, “I think so,” they’ll say, “Then you’re saved and you need to stop the devil from bothering you.” There’s not a biblical bone in their brains.

Look what the Bible says. How can you know that you’re saved? How can you know it?

Look what he says.

By this we know that we have come to know Him.

Because our heart tells us?

Because the preacher tells us?

Because we just feel it?

Look what he says. By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. And that keep there is in present tense, as well as many of the other things here in this text. And what he’s saying is, if we keep on keeping His commandments, we know that we know Him, if we persevere in His commandments, we know that we know Him. And then he goes on and says, the one who is opposite doesn’t know Him.

Now, I want you to look at something for a moment. What does it mean to keep His commandments? Does it mean to walk in sinless perfection? No. Again, it is a style of life.

If we were to take your life out and film it every day 24 hours a day, would we see a style of life that desired to know God’s commandments, desired to obey them, was growing in victory in obedience, and was also broken when it didn’t obey, would we see that in your life?

You say, “Well, I’ve kept the commandments before.” You forget what he’s saying. If you keep on keeping … perseverance. Why perseverance? Because of the promises of God.

He who began a good work in you will finish it, and if the work isn’t finished, He didn’t do it.

Is your lifestyle marked by a keen interest in God’s commandments and a desire to obey them?

Again, someone comes to me and says, “Brother Paul, I have a new relationship with God.”

And I tell them, “Do you have a new relationship with sin? Because, if you don’t have a new relationship with sin, you don’t have a new relationship with God.”

And then I ask, “If you’ve got a new relationship with God, well, tell me, do you have a new relationship with His commands? Do you have a new relationship with his Word? Because, if you don’t have a new relationship with His Word, you don’t have a new relationship with him.”

Now look at verse 4. The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

If you’ve been in any kind of meetings, especially among people who consider themselves to be super spiritual and vocal about it, I mean, meetings will get going and the preacher will start preaching or the music will get rolling, and someone will jump up and say, “Oh, hallelujah, He’s my Savior. Hallelujah, I know Him.”

That’s exactly what John is talking about right here. The one who jumps up in the middle of the meeting and says “I know I’ve come to know Him,” but does not keep his commandments is a liar. He’s a liar.

Now, again, look at this from the context. John is the apostle of love. Paul was known for his great mind, but I think John was known for his great love, and, yet, this humble, broken apostle is laying down the verdict. You are a liar. It’s an amazing thing, isn’t it.

Now, it goes on. Let’s go to another test. Verse 6 of chapter 2. The one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.

The Christian ought to walk as Jesus walked, and you say, “Brother Paul, you’ve gone too far now. Who can walk like Jesus walked?”

Let me give you an illustration to try to explain to you what I mean. When I was a little boy, my father was a very big man, very smart man, and like all little boys, I wanted to be just like him. Now, up north, we raised cattle and raised quarter horses. We’d get big snows and my dad would come into my room at five in the morning, even when I was a little boy, and say, “Paul boy, get up. No rest for the wicked.” And when he said, “Get up,” you got up. And we would walk out there in the snow, and the one thing I can always remember doing is—my father would take these big strides and leave these footprints in the snow. Now, I wanted to walk like my dad walked, and so I would try to stretch my legs out and put my foot in his footprint, and I would stretch my legs out. Now, you can imagine, I was stretching out farther than I could ever go. You can imagine I looked ridiculous, and you can imagine I fell down, but you will also know by looking at that picture that the greatest desire in my heart was to walk like he walked. You could tell, looking at that little boy, he wanted to be like his dad even though sometimes he didn’t look anything like him.

Let me ask you. What’s the greatest desire in your heart? Is your great desire to walk like He walked? To be like He was? Is that your great desire? Are you seeking to put your foot in his footprints?

Listen to me, man. Listen to me, woman, because, if you’re not, be afraid. A reporter came up to me one time, and he said, “Why are you telling people to be afraid all the time?” I said, “Because they ought to be afraid.”

Again, this is the test. This is the exam. If I were to look at your life, if I were to film the whole thing, would I see since the supposed day of your conversion this desire to walk like Him, or do you desire to walk like everybody else? Do you desire to walk like the world and act like the world and talk like the world and fellowship with the world? Do you identify with the world? Or is it Jesus? Is it Jesus?

We’re not talking about whether or not you need to rededicate your life tonight. We’re talking about whether or not you need to get saved. Now, let’s go on.

The next test. Verse 9 of chapter 2. The one who says he is in the Light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now. The one who loves his brother abides in the Light and there is no cause for stumbling in him. But the one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes.

Now, brother here is not referring to the poor, even though we ought to love the poor. It’s not referring to someone of another race. I always thought that was a quite stupid statement anyway because there’s no more than one race, folks. It’s called human. Unless you’ve got a Martian tucked into your pocket somewhere, there’s only one race. We’re to love people of all different colors and cultures and all that. We know that. But that’s not what he’s talking about here.

When he says brother, he’s talking about believers. If you say that you know God and yet you do not love other believers in a real and practical way and desire fellowship with them, you’re lost.

Now, let me give you an example. Remember when Jesus said, I was in prison; you did not visit me. I was hungry; you did not feed me; I was naked; you did not clothe me. And guys who do prison ministries will always use that verse saying, We need to go into the prisons. Well, we need to go into prisons but that verse doesn’t really have anything to do with that unless there’s Christians in there.

What this verse is talking about, and I learned it quite well in Peru and in other third-world countries. In some third-world countries––my friend, listen to me—you get thrown into jail, you will starve to death unless every day somebody from the outside brings you food. You will. They do not provide food for you. You will die. Now, let’s say that someone is thrown in prison, not for being an assassin or a thief, but they’re thrown in prison in the time of the apostles for being a Christian. They’re locked away in there. Now, they’re going to die, they’re going to starve to death unless somebody else brings them food. Now, that presents a problem because the authorities know anybody that brings this guy food has to be a Christian. And so the one who goes to take him food is in danger of being thrown in prison himself. That’s what Jesus is talking about—a love so great that you would risk your own life to care for other brothers and sisters in Christ.

Now, listen to me. Do you love to be with people who love to be with and talk about and worship and serve God? Or would you rather be with people who have nothing to do with God? Because you are demonstrating what you are.

Like I said, I was raised on a farm. You do not see the chickens over there having a good time with the pigs. Chickens hang with chickens. Pigs do their own thing. It’s their nature.

You say, “Well, I’m a believer but, man, all my friends are, you know, they’re. . . .” Yeah, I know. They’re lost.

Do you love other Christians? “Well, I, you know, I, I come to church.”

Big deal. The devil comes to church. What do you do when you get here? What do you do outside it? Because the church isn’t this tent. It’s not that building, it’s the people.

How many Christians are you serving? How many Christians are you reading the Bible with? How many Christians are you praying for? How many Christians are you loving? How many . . . .

I’ve got a dear friend in my church back home, and he knows I’m here in Texas for a little while. He’s adopted my mother. He’s cleaning up her place; he’s mowing her yard; he’s doing all sort of things. Why? She’s a believer, and because of the will of God, her son’s being sent to Texas so he is taking over. That’s what I mean. That’s what I mean.

I’ve had both my hips replaced because my bones are degenerating. You know how they got replaced? I was a missionary. I didn’t have a dime. How am I going to get implants? How am I going to be operated on? A man in Austin, Texas––Steven Whitlock, III––a young guy, 32 years old, but a brilliant man. He walks into his Sunday school class one day at a church there in Austin, Texas. He hears people praying about a missionary who can hardly walk up in the Andes Mountains. He goes, “Give me his name.” He called me. He said, “Come. Come to Austin. I’m getting the ticket. I’m getting the doctors. I’m getting everything. Your hips are taken care of.” That’s what I’m talking about.

I was walking through the jungles one time, high jungles, in Departmento Amazonas in Peru during the war with the Sendero Luminoso. We were in a place the military wouldn’t go, and we were lost––me and another brother. And we were traveling through the night in the darkness. We had smuggled ourselves up there in the back of grain trucks, and we were going to preach in the place because the believers were just depressed and torn apart and didn’t know what to do and everyone’s making fun of them. We knew we had to go in there. So we would get lost, and we’re going through the jungle and, finally, we come upon this village. We walk in there. We don’t know where to go. We don’t know where to spend the night. We know that the terrorists can be absolutely everywhere . We know we could be a dead man, and Paco walks up to this person out on the streets, like almost midnight, and he goes, “Á Hermanos por acá,”––Are there brothers through here? And someone said, “That old lady over there”––an old Nazarene woman. We knock on the door, and I said, “Soy pastor.” She grabs both of us, pulls us in, shuts the door behind us, sticks us down in the basement, goes out, kills a chicken, fries up some yucca, everything you can imagine. She’s feeding us. She’s taking care of us. She’s housing us. Could she get in trouble? Yes, she could.

And then you say, “Oh, I’m a Christian because I go to church.” You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s love? To you? You need a new definition.

You say, “Brother Paul, you’re using satire.” Read the prophets. They did the same. Some of this Christianity floating around America is worthy of making fun of, and it ought to be exposed.

Do you love the people of God? You know, who are you with? Someone asked me, “How did you know––young guys always ask me, “How did you know that Charo, your wife, was the woman for you?” I said, “Real easy. I wanted to be with her.” “How’d you know you loved her?” “I just wanted to be with her.” How do you know you love them? You just want to be with them and talk about Jesus. Talk about Jesus. Do you love?

Now, let’s go on. There’s much more here, but we need to continue on. I want to go through another test. Chapter 2, verse 15. Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

What is the world? Everything in this fallen age that contradicts the attributes and will of God. Everything that does not come forth from God and goes back to God in worship. That’s the world.

You say, “Well, I love secular music.” Let me just share something with you. I don’t care. I’m not going there. This is what I’m going to tell you. It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s secular or Christian. My question is—what’s being said in those words? Because if what’s being said in those words contradicts the will of God, you’re violating His will, and you’re loving it.

And the adults here are probably going, “Amen.” Okay, let’s talk about your television. You watch things. You expect God to move? You love those. You love their jokes, their off-color jokes, their humor. You find yourself laughing in wickedness. And then you want God to move in your family and move in your life. Do you love the world?

My dear friends, yesterday I was nine years old; today I am 43. Tomorrow I will be 90. Life is a vapor. It is fleeting. Everything will die. All will pass away. We are to love the things of God, the things that are eternal, and one of the signs of a Christian is that they are not entrapped or enslaved to the things of this present evil age, but they are set free to see Christ in His glory and follow Him and follow hard after him. Christ!

I was preaching at a university thing about a year and a half ago, and I noticed that everyone was seated and it was about two minutes before it was all to begin. All of a sudden at a side door in the auditorium, probably a group of 30, 40 beautiful girls come walking in and just kind of walked down the front there and sat down in all the seats. I mean, it was designed for them to showcase what they were. I looked at all of them, and I said, “Young women,” I said, “let me give you a little bit of advice. I can see. I’m a man. Many of you are very, very, very, very beautiful. One day all of you are going to be terribly, terribly ugly.” It’s true.

To the wind with your money. To the wind with your beauty. To the wind with your wealth. It will not remain. The only thing that remains is the glories of Christ. Death is a present reality.

You say, “Oh, how do you know? You’re not that old.” My brother died. My father died in my arms. I preached the funeral of my sister. I know about death. And I know that it could come to some of you before I finish snapping these fingers.

You say, “Brother Paul, you’re trying to scare me.” You have discerned correctly.

Love the world? You love to listen to the very things that nailed your supposed Master to the tree? Come off of it, man. Become a hellion, give yourself to demons, run wild, but don’t come in here saying you’re a believer and playing that game. You want to dance with the devil, then dance all night long, but don’t come in here dancing with Christ for a moment and then go back out there and share your love. We’re talking about loyalty. Love the world that nailed Christ to a tree?

Many of you, just by professing faith in Christ, you crucify again the Son of God. You need to realize something. This is the Christ. This is the Son of God. This is the Lord of Glory.

Isn’t it amazing that we’re going to have believers from China, believers from Northern Nigeria that have died as martyrs, dragged through the desert behind camels, some of them skinned alive, but they would not deny Jesus. And here’s all these American Christians standing beside them that couldn’t even find enough of anything inside them to even attend church on Sunday morning.

Does anybody have a problem with that?

One man can be skinned alive and not deny Christ, and the other denies him in the smallest of things. And yet, they’re all born again? I think not, my friend. I think not.

Do you love the world?

Look at verse 16. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the [boastful] pride of life. . . . It is not from the Father, but from the world.

Sometimes I’ll get seminary students, and they’ve all got this great idea that they’re going to go out and do something for God. So, I’ll stand before them and I’ll say, “Okay, I want everybody to breathe in.” They all breathe in. I say, “Breathe out.” They breathe out. I say, “Theologically, from where did that breath come?” They say, “From God.”

I say, “Okay, you can’t breathe on your own. Now, what are you going to do for God?”

The lust of the flesh, the pride of body. We live today basically in the Roman Empire; can’t you see that? We have around us an empire of flesh and muscle and beauty and hair, and it will all rot in the tomb. Rot in the tomb. The wealth and the glamour and the glitter and all the things in which people are investing their lives will all rot, but the one who does the will of God will abide forever.

I look at my life right now. I’m middle-aged, and I think sometimes back. I think what if I was not a Christian. What would be my attitude now? Think about it. I’m 43. The days of my strength are over. The days of my beauty—they’re over. The days of wonder and dreams about what my life is going to be—they’re over. What’s left for me? Just to grow older, more tired, and die. And yet, here I am now, a Christian. What does it mean? By God’s grace, 22 years have not been wasted. In a meager, trifling sort of way, maybe, but truly in a way, they have been given to Christ and now the years ahead of me.

And you know what? I’m a boy of God. You’re not a man of God till you’re about 65. I see men of God still alive and those that have gone on before me. I listen to those old men at 85 and 90, barely can stand up in a pulpit and begin to speak and just glory all around them. And I say, “Lord, is that’s what’s waiting me?”

I hear about the saints that are about to cross over and their eyes fly open and they just cry out, “Glory, glory!” Lord, is that waiting for me? It’s going to get better. Just going to get better.

You say, “Well, your candle’s going to be put out.” Yes, my candle’s going to be put out only because the sun’s coming up. This world is passing away and I can tell you biblically that, if you’re living for it, you’re an absolute fool. But the one who does the will of God abides forever. And for those of you who are young, oh, what a precious opportunity now to serve the Lord. Now to serve Him.

Many that were called and used mightily of God were called as children in the Bible. Don’t you see that? How old was this Samuel when he began to hear the voice of God? You say, “Oh, I must wait.” No, you must not wait. Seek Him now. Seek Him hard. If you seek Him hard, he will let Himself be found by you.

It goes on. Verse 19. They went out from us, but they were not really of us, for, if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out so that it would be shown that they all are not of us.

Now, this does not mean, if someone leaves our church and goes to another, that they’re not a Christian; that’s not what that means. What it’s talking about is this. The true Christian who has entered into Biblical historical Christianity and then leaves, might go into some new stuff, new Christianity, new teachings––they’re rampant; they’re everywhere; every wind is offered––leaves what is known as basic historic Christianity to go follow after some new stuff that has very little to do with Scripture and nothing to do with Biblical history. They’ve gone out from us. They don’t remain in the body. Or someone who comes in and they might be with the group, you know, with the church, with the fellowship, with the congregation for six months or a year and then they depart and they stay departed and they don’t go to another fellowship. What does that mean? They went out from us. And what is it showing? They never were of us. Because once you’re in Christianity, you stay in Christianity because He who brought you in keeps you in. It wasn’t Noah who shut that door behind himself on that boat. It was God.

I hear so many people that will say, “Oh, if I just make it to heaven, I’ll be secure. If I just make it to heaven, I’ll be secure.” Knowing that, then where was the devil when he fell? It’s not heaven that’s going to make you secure, my friend. It’s being in Christ that makes you secure.

It goes on. Another test, verse 22, chapter 2. Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son. Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father; the one who confesses the Son has the Father also.

The true Christian is going to embrace the fullness of the person of Jesus Christ. Now, many of you are saying, yes, that is true. They are going to believe that Jesus is God in the flesh. Yes, that’s true. They’re going to believe that God became man, that He was a real man. Yes, that’s true, but that’s not all it means to embrace the fullness of Christ’s person.

This silly little stuff going around in America today that you can receive Jesus as Savior and not Lord is absolutely absurd. The fullness of His person you believe in, you receive, you embrace. All of it.

Jesus is Savior. Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Prophet, Priest, and King. Jesus is the only prophet who ever walked on this earth. Jesus is the only King. Jesus is the only true Priest. Jesus is, again, the only true Wise Man.

Let me ask you, do you believe that? All right, how much are you going to His Word to find His wisdom? Do you believe He’s King? How much are you going to His Word to find His law? Do you believe He’s Prophet and He knows about your latter days? Then how much are you going to the Word to settle those latter days through your own obedience?

Now, finally, look in verse 29 of chapter 2. If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone who practices righteousness is born of God.

Now what is righteousness? Everything that conforms. Everything that conforms to the nature and law of God.

Do you practice righteousness? If we were to look at your life, are you practicing God’s law?

Are you practicing God’s wisdom, God’s Word, God’s precepts? Are you? Is it a practice in your life, or are you departing from it? Does it have nothing to do––absolutely nothing to do with you?

In Matthew chapter 7, Jesus says, Depart from me you who practice lawlessness. That’s one of the most terrifying statements in the Bible for American Christianity because basically what He’s saying is this: Depart from me those of you who claim to be my disciples and yet you lived as though I never gave you a law to obey. I just described most of what’s called the church in America today.

“I’m a disciple.” What’s your relationship to His Word?

“I know Him.” What’s your relationship to His Word?

Are you seeking to know His wisdom, His precepts, His commands, and to practice them? Is it a part of your life?

Now, let me tell you something, something––I think legalism is death. Let me tell you that. I think it is. I think it’s death. But I want to tell you something.

The Bible tells us what we can think about and what we cannot think about. Do you know those commands? And are you practicing them?

The Bible tells us what we ought to watch and we should not watch. Do you know those commands? Do you care? Are you practicing them?

The Bible tells us—now, listen to me—the Bible tells us what we can wear and not wear. You say, “Oh boy, here he goes.” No, listen to me. I’m not talking about defining every last––crossing every T, dotting every I, that you can’t wear this. It is telling us this. Whatever you put on your body better be decent. It better be decent and it ought to enhance the beauty God’s already given you.

I look around today and see what people are wearing, and it reminds me of the Communist countries I’ve preached in right after their liberation. One thing about a communist country, the communists come in Eastern Europe filled with all these little brick roads and beautiful little stone houses and everything. The communists come in and tear it all down, put in pavement and these ugly concrete blocks, and make everybody—they take beauty and destroy it.

Look at fashion today. Look at it. It’s not conformed to the will of God. God wants His people to be beautiful. It’s a God that also means modest and decent. But He wants them beautiful. He wants them full of life, full of color. He wants them to be a beautiful people, but what do we see? Grunge, dressed in black, hanging over like this. I mean, it’s unbelievable. In a way, I think it’s really, really good because, I mean, a man who’s godly no longer will have much temptation. The girls are trying to look as ugly as possible. I mean, that’s not what God wants.

Let me just—I know I’m kind of—I don’t have much time to preach to you, so I’m going to use a shotgun approach here. Girls and guys, let me give you a thing that my wife uses, and it’s really, really good. It’s this. If your clothing is a frame for your face, it’s of God. If your clothing brings attention to your face from which the glory of God should be shining, it’s of God. If your clothing is a frame for your body, it is sensual and God hates it. Now, I know they’re kind of pretty broad guidelines, but there they are. It doesn’t mean you have to dress like a Puritan and put buckles on your shoes or anything like that, but those are the guidelines. Right there.

Righteousness. And why am I saying this? Because the Bible touches every aspect of our lives. There’s something in there for every area of our life, and what we need to do is discover what that is and conform our lives to it. And you say, “Oh, what a burden.” You’re lost, because the Bible says the commandments of God for a Christian are not a burden; they’re a joy. They’re a joy.

Verse 3 of chapter 3. Everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure. Now, look at this. What is it talking about? The hope for the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Everybody now reading these Left Behind books—the only thing left behind in the Left Behind series was the Bible. But everybody’s excited. You know––“I believe in the Second Coming.” “I believe Jesus is going to come.” “I believe in all this stuff.” Okay, we’ll see whether you believe it or not, because it says in verse 3, Everyone who has this hope—what does he do?—purifies himself, just as he is pure.

Now, here’s something Christian. It’s just going to blow your mind. You know, we are told to purify ourselves, and some of you guys need to hear this who are really, really theological. Not only has God sanctified us in Christ; he calls us to strive to be holy. He calls us to purify ourselves. Let me ask you a question. Could I sit down with you right now and you talk to me—we’re all alone—you talk to me about the ways in which you are seeking to purify yourself? Can you?

Going into the book of Hebrews, could you sit down with me right now and we could open it up, and I say, “Just share with me how this affects your life.” Could you sit down with me right now and explain to me the ways in which you’re striving after holiness? Do you see? Do you see?

This Bible is not poetry. It’s not just little maxims that are cute. It is your life. It is your life.

Everyone who has this hope—that hopes in Him—how do we know that we really hope in Him? Because we’re seeking to make ourselves pure. We’re seeking—we’re striving after holiness. We’re striving after holiness. We really are. Are you striving after holiness?

My mom—she’s almost 77, and she raised most of us kids by herself because my dad died. Tough lady. She’s Croatian. Her parents came over through Ellis Island. She went through the depression. She’s a tough lady. She’s from Detroit. It makes her mean. She’ll sit there sometimes––I’ll be over there. I’ll go over to her house, pass by there before I go to the office in the morning, she’ll be over the Word. I’ll look up at her and she’ll just be broken. She was saved when she was ten. She’ll look up at me with tears in her eyes and say, “I am just so unholy. I am just—I just found—look at this verse. God’s telling me my mouth, my tongue—I spoke out of turn the other night. I’ve got to go back and ask my sister to forgive me.” I’m going, “Oh, mom.” She says, “Sometime I don’t even think I’m saved.” I said, “Mom, this is the evidence that you are.” All these years of walking with Christ and yet, still there, striving to be holy. Yes, resting in the finished work of Christ, yes, but striving to be holy, to be righteous. Everyone who has this hope is going to do that.

Now, he says, verse 4, Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness. What does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means. He’s trying to show you how horrible sin is, because we really don’t get it.

I love what Watson says in A BODY OF DIVINITY. He’s always saying this, he goes, “You have not sinned against an inferior prince. You’ve not sinned against a small mayor from a small village. You have sinned against the Lord of Glory, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords. You know not what you’ve done. “

Imagine this.

Here stands God on the day of creation. He looks at stars that could swallow up a thousand of our suns. He looks at them and He says, “All you stars, move yourself to this place and start in this order and move in a circle, and move exactly as I tell you until I give you another word.” And they all obey him. He says, “Planets, pick yourself up and whirl. Make this formation at My command until I give you another word.” He looks at mountains and he says, “Be lifted up,” and they obey Him. He tells valleys, “Be cast down,” and they obey Him. He looks at the sea and says, “You will come this far,” and the sea obeys,

and then He looks at you and says, “Come.” And you go, “No!”

Look at the horrid, wretchedness of sin, the vulgarity, the prostitution of sin. It is a horrid thing, not something to be trifled with. As I said, it is a beast, and it is waiting at the door, and its desire is to have you. And anyone who practices sin practices outright, open, clenched-fisted rebellion against the Lord of Glory.

Now, it’s here. We all realize that the Bible’s already taught us that believers will sin, but there is a difference between a believer who sins, confesses their sin, and going on to greater holy, being disciplined of the Lord but going on to greater holiness, and someone who just out and out practices sin as a habitual lifestyle.

Verse 5. You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin. He appeared to take away the very sin that many people relish and love.

Verse 6. No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him. Again, it’s talking about a style of life, of practicing sin. Little children, make sure no one deceives you.

Now, I’m telling you this. Little children, adults, make sure no one deceives you. Make sure some pastor doesn’t deceive you, make sure your momma doesn’t deceive you, your dad doesn’t deceive you, or some well-meaning carnal Christian does not deceive you.

He says, Little children, make sure no one deceives you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous; the one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning.

You practice sin as a habitual lifestyle? You love what you can get away with? My friend, you’re of the devil.

Now, let’s go back to verse 12 of the final chapter, chapter 5. The last test. There’s many more, but we don’t have time this evening.

He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus. Jesus. You know, it’s almost absurd to ask this question. We’ve actually come to believe in American Christianity that you can be Christian and Jesus not be all the world to you.

Do you love Jesus? What do you think about most? What do you think about most? I know men who love the ministry more than they love Jesus. I know men who love the Bible more than they love Jesus. What do you think about most? Because that’s what you love.

Now, my dear friend, listen to me. I’ve got to make a stop here, correct a few things. There are some struggling believers here tonight that need to realize something. Again, we are not talking about sinless perfection. We are not saying that, if you’re a true Christian, Christ will always be at the forefront of your thoughts. We’re not saying, if you’re a true Christian, you are always going to be practicing righteousness. Again, what we’re talking about is a style of life and a struggle.

I tell my mother, “Mom, the greatest evidence that you’re a Christian is the fact that right now you’re in the Word and God’s pointing out to you your sin.”

The mere fact some of you need to hear this. The mere fact that you struggle with the fact that you don’t love Him enough is evidence that you’re a believer. The mere fact that you look at your own life and you realize you’re not as holy or righteous as you want to be and it bothers you is evidence that you’ve come to know him.

What I’m preaching against tonight is the person who lives in habitual sin, who loves the world and all these different things, or a person sliding in that direction, or a person who just—“Yes, Jesus is a little accessory onto my life.”

The warning is for that person.

You know, I hear these preachers today and they’ll preach and they’ll go, “Man, you’ve got it all.” I’ve heard them give this kind of invitation. “Man, you’ve got it all. You’ve got a wonderful, beautiful family; you’ve got your health; you’ve got a wonderful job and all these things. You just lack one more thing to make your life complete. You lack Jesus.”

Makes me want to vomit.

My friend, He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son has nothing. All your wealth, all your health, all your relations, everything you have is dung if Jesus is not Lord and Savior and Passion of your life. He’s not an accessory that you add on to an already great life. He is Life.

That’s why He meant, you know, You drink my blood, you eat my flesh. What was He talking about? He’s not some accessory. He’s the very source of your life.

Is he yours? Is he yours?

Let’s pray.

Father, we come before You in the name of Your Son. And, Lord, this has been long and hard, but I felt a measure of grace in it, Lord, and I pray, I pray, dear Lord, that You would work in the hearts of people that You would save, that You would convert; and that, Lord, even some of Your people who may have been sliding into the things of the world, that this has been used as discipline to turn them; to others, Lord, who believe themselves saved, that this has been used to show them they are not saved; and to struggling believers, that it has been used to show them that assuredly they are believers. God, use Your Word to do many more things than what we could ever think or believe. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Transcribed by www.bibletranscripts.com. This sermon was preached at and is distributed by Grace Community Church in San Antonio, Texas. http://www.gccsatx.com. This was the sermon that God used to save Paul Washer’s wife, Charo, out of her false profession despite all her years as a missionary.

For more info about Paul Washer go to: http://www.heartcrymissionary.com

Paul Washer weeping for souls… will not anyone see people for what they are? Will people stop playing games with the eternal salvation of millions?