I was asked at my table
what would I preach
to bring church members to Christ.
And I said the last thing I would preach
would be John 3 16.
That just lulls everyone in the building to sleep.
I would preach the Lordship of Christ,
I would preach repentance,
I would preach the new birth,
I would preach the necessary evidence of the new birth,
I would preach the sovereignty of God in salvation
to the extent that I could push that.
I would do everything that I could
to blow a trumpet in Zion
and to awaken those that are asleep.
And when I was at my previous church
it was not a county church
but it was a long standing church, 100 years old;
when I preached 1 John
and the necessary evidences of the new birth
it rocked the planet -
for good and for worse.
And if you do not see this evidence in your life,
you are not saved,
you are self deceived,
you have never been born again.
And I mean across the board,
it’s not 3 out of these 9 tests.
It’s not a multiple choice.
All 9 of these will be evident and present in your life
if you are born of God,
if you know God,
and if not,
you’re going to hell.
And I remember one year we had 100 adult conversions.
That’s a lot of adult conversions.
That’s a lot of people 60 years old,
50 years old,
being saved.
I had one deacon saved in the deacon’s meeting.
I just happened to be sitting next to him
and he said, “If this is what it is to be a Christian,
then I’ve never been a Christian.”
Well you just got to peel back all of the veneers
and layers of religiosity
and churchianity
to get down to the live nerve
of what it is to be a follower of Jesus Christ.
And there is a necessary evidence of the new birth
and that’s why 1 John is written.
That you may know that you have eternal life
and there is something worse than
not having the assurance of your salvation.
What’s worse is to have a false assurance of no salvation.
And so you just have to shake people loose
from their dead testimony,
from their dead religion
and you just have to be relentless with it.
You have to paint things black and white.
And people like that usually don’t walk the aisle
at the end of the service.
I mean Spurgeon said
the wounded deer wants to withdraw to the thickets
and lick its wounds in private,
rather than be paraded forward in front of a TV camera.
And so there was week, after week,
after week, after week,
just nonstop - that knock on my office door -
when the service is over.
“Can I talk to you?”
And my office became like the birthing room
at the hospital.
And I would just say have a seat
and the cushion is still creased from the last person that sat there,
the box of Kleenex right there
and people just under a sense of desperation
and that’s the way it was in Acts 2.
They interrupted Peter’s sermon
and the sinners gave the invitation.
“What must we do to be saved?”
There was a sense of desperation.
So you know,
there is a certain kind of preaching,
and there are certain subject matters
that are like well chosen arrows for the bow
that find their target.