Gospel

1 Corinthians chapter 15, and we're going to read it in verse number 1. Paul, as he's writing to these believers at Corinth, he says, Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand, by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you, first of all, that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. And he was seen of Cephas, or Peter, then of the twelve.

After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep, or some have died. After that, he was seen of James. Good, we're back on.

I'm thinking of something I saw on the news, a news site, and it happened right here in the big state of, well, the state of Wisconsin. I don't know how big it is. We're not in Texas.

Everything's big in Texas. But in the state of Wisconsin, and it actually was making the news up in Canada where I come from, and it happened not far from here. It happened over in the capital, Madison, Wisconsin, and it happened right in the capital building, the state legislature in Madison, Wisconsin, so that's close to home.

This is news that is close to home. And it happened in the days leading up to Easter, so just before last weekend. And there was a sign that was put up, maybe you saw it.

There was a sign put up in the rotunda in the large entranceway where you come in in the state legislature building, and it was positioned right beside a little presentation about Easter. I was surprised that that would have been allowed there, but there was a little display concerning Easter that was coming, but right beside it, there was this big poster, and maybe you saw it, maybe you hit the papers here, and it had some words on it, and it says this. It says, nobody died for your sins.

Jesus is a myth. That's what was on that sign. Now, I suppose they had to give them equal airtime because I was surprised to think that they allowed a Christian display in regards to the resurrection.

But here, the opposing view was, nobody died for your sins. Jesus is a myth. You know, that is, unfortunately, the reality of much in the world today.

There are many people, and they think, just because enough people have said it over a long enough period of time, and they are thinking, they are saying that, you know, this really didn't happen. This man named Jesus didn't even exist. And more importantly, nobody died for your sins.

And that's what they want you to believe. That's what they want you to believe because they don't want to believe the reality of what truly happened. They don't want to become themselves responsible to the truth of what the gospel is all about, that Christ did, in fact, die for our sins according to the scriptures.

He was buried, and he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. You see, it's not a myth. I probably said this before, but you have to understand this.

What we read in the Bible about the Lord Jesus Christ it was written by men that were eyewitnesses, people that had actually seen the events that are recorded in the four gospels, men that had been there, men that had saw the Lord Jesus move with mighty power. There were people that had been there, and they had sat amongst the group when they were hungry, and 5,000 people were fed, above women and children, 5,000 people were fed from a few loaves and fishes. And if you had been alive in the day when the gospel was written, you could have went to people and said, was that true? Did the Lord Jesus really die, really rather feed those people? Did you really eat that bread? And they said, yeah, and it was good.

And it wasn't just a little piece. There was enough so that there was even baskets left over. We had more than enough to eat.

We were there. Maybe you could have even went to a man and say, now, listen, were you really born blind? Could you not see for 40 years and after meeting the Lord Jesus, you were able to see? He says, I'm able to see today. I'm able to see because of the power of this one called Jesus Christ.

And you could have went up and down the line of all these different folks and people that had seen it, and you could have went to them and said, did it really happen? And they said, I want to assure you, I was there. I was a witness. And so the gospel, the gospel that we preach concerning this person, the Lord Jesus, he was not a myth.

He was a real person. Oh, but what a person he was. He just wasn't any ordinary person.

He proved through the words that he said, through the miracles that he performed, through all the different things in his life, he proved that he was, in fact, the son of God. And being son of God, listen, we have to listen. We are responsible for what the Lord Jesus said.

And more importantly, for what the Lord Jesus did. He is the one that brought to us the gospel. He's the one that knew that we were lost in our sins.

He's the one that knew that without a savior, we would perish for all eternity. And so the Lord Jesus Christ came into this world for one purpose. And that purpose was to go to a cross, to die on that cross, so that every single woman, boy and girl and man could be saved.

Saved from the penalty of their sin, saved from the power of sin, and ultimately saved from the very presence of sin. So here's Paul. And this man, Paul, he's saying, listen, this is the gospel.

You know, sometimes people think the gospel is, you need to have a lot of theology. You need to have a lot of learning and schooling. You know, you've got to know a whole bunch of big words to understand what the gospel... Paul's telling us what the gospel is very simply.

He says, here's the gospel. This is the gospel that I preach. This is the gospel by which you were saved.

This is the gospel that is going to take you safe all the way home. What is it? He says, Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures, according to the word of God. He was buried and he rose again the third day, according to the scriptures.

He says, there's the gospel. That's the gospel message in a nutshell. All that you need to know, Christ died for our sins.

This is the gospel that he preached. And you know, there's a lot of people and they would like to bring this gospel message, this Christian message, and they want to put it on the same level as every other message. And you'll run into that as you get a bit old.

Maybe you'll run into it already. And people will say, yes, that's a good message, but what about the message of Islam? Or what about the message of the Buddha? What about the message of Hinduism? Aren't they all the same? I mean, don't they all speak of good things and wonderful things? And really, we can pick and choose which one sort of, you know, matches our culture and matches our thinking. And any one of those, they're really all the same.

And that's what people think. That's what people are going to try to tell you. There's no difference between Jesus Christ or Mohammed.

There's no difference between the Lord Jesus and the Buddha. They'll say they were all, they were just good men. And they will say that they're all the same thing, the same message, but just in a different way.

Well, what we've read here, and really the whole crux, the whole pivot point of the gospel message, which differentiates it from everything else in this world, is that the one who proclaimed it, the one who said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, yes, he died. The Buddha died. Mohammed died.

Confucius died. All these different so-called religious leaders, they died. And people make pilgrimages to their tombs.

People make pilgrimages to where their bones, their bodies were laid, and they turned to dust. But when it comes to the gospel, when it comes to what differentiates this message from any other message that you will ever find in this world, is that the Lord Jesus, he died, and he was placed in a tomb, but he never saw corruption. His body never decayed, for on the third day, God in power raised him from the dead.

And listen, that is what makes this message different than any other message, the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who died, died for our sins, died because of our sin, died because we had no way to pay God as far as our sins were concerned, and so he died. But because death had no power over him, God wouldn't suffer his holy one to see corruption. He raised him from the dead on the third day, and he rose, he arose from the dead, and he proved himself alive, the Bible tells us, by many infallible proofs.

Well, people today say, well, the resurrection, there's a good story. I mean, that's better than one of Aesop's fables. You know, that's a myth.

That's just something that is made up. Well, here in chapter 15, Paul, he is going to, he is going to prove the truth of what he is saying by telling the people, listen, I've got witnesses. I've got witnesses to what I'm saying.

I can tell you of people, there are people alive today, when Paul was writing this, that had seen the Lord Jesus alive. They saw him raised from the dead. They saw the one who was dead nailed to a cross.

They saw that very same one in their midst. It was real. They saw a resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.

And you say, well, people just believe that because that's what's in the Bible, but listen, there are other things, other evidences that prove that he truly was raised from the dead. Apart from what the scripture, we don't need anything else apart from the scripture. The word of God is living.

It is eternal. It is absolutely true. We don't need any other point of reference, but listen, we can look at some of the things outside the Bible and see it had to be true.

It must have been true. Because remember, before the Lord Jesus resurrected, before he was raised from the dead, think of what his disciples were like. Remember after he died, after they saw him crucified, after he was buried, boy, they were disheartened.

They were, it was like their world had come to an end. They had been expecting such great things of this man called Jesus Christ. They were expecting him to set up the kingdom and they would be administrators in that kingdom.

They thought all these, they were gonna have a place in the government of God. They thought that, but they saw the Lord Jesus die. And now they're locking themselves in rooms.

They're going back to their old jobs and they're just so disheartened. But something happened. Something changed those men where instead of being discouraged, all of a sudden they were bold.

All of a sudden, instead of hiding themselves, they came out into the open and they were proclaiming the message of the gospel. Why? Because they heard a good story. No, because they had seen for themselves.

They had seen for themselves the one who was dead. They had seen that dead man, the Lord Jesus Christ. They had seen him.

He had moved amongst them. They had eaten with them. And because those men had seen with their own eyes, it changed their whole outlook.

And those men, instead of cowering, instead of being afraid what the religious leaders and the Jews and maybe even the Romans would say, they spoke boldly concerning this person, Jesus Christ, because they had seen him alive. Listen, he rose from the dead. Not only because the disciples were willing to die for what they believed, because every one of them, 11 of them at least, the history, tradition tells us they all were martyrs because of their belief in the doctrine of the gospel.

And why would they die if they didn't think it was true? They knew it was true because they had seen the Lord Jesus alive. But not only because the disciples died for their beliefs, but just think of the effect it had on people who had before been skeptical. You know, skeptical is people that, you know, they won't believe it.

They, I don't believe that. Well, there were skeptics in the Lord's life. You know what? There were skeptics in the Lord Jesus' house.

You think someone growing up, just imagine if you were in the house where the Lord Jesus grew up. He had brothers. He had other siblings, brothers and sisters.

And those other siblings, they grew up in the same house as the Lord Jesus. And, you know, I had three brothers growing up in my house and I was never jealous of them because they got in as much trouble as I did. You know, it was a given.

They were getting as much trouble as me because we were all the same thing. We were sinners. But imagine growing up in a house where there was someone in that house who was absolutely perfect.

Never did a thing wrong. Always obedient to his parents. Maybe even anticipating what the parents were gonna ask, what they needed.

And he was always doing what was absolutely right and correct. You think that would have spoke to his brother, but it seemed that instead of convincing him who he was, they probably didn't like him. They wouldn't believe on him.

They didn't believe on him in his life. But there came a time when they became believers in the Lord Jesus. Why was that? Because they had seen this one who was dead, raised from the dead, and walk amongst them.

And because they had seen a resurrected, living Lord Jesus Christ, they couldn't help but believe that this was in fact the very Son of God, the Savior of the world. And so those brethren that wouldn't believe on him while he was living, probably even jealous about the Lord Jesus, now they'd seen him walking. They'd seen him moving.

They'd seen him talking and conversing with people. They believed on in them. Why? Because he was raised from the dead.

This same Jesus raised from the dead. What about his enemies? This man, Paul, that we're reading, that writing these words here, we read the words that he wrote. 20, 25 years before, you had to run into Paul, and he would have been a rabid opponent of the Lord Jesus.

He was a man who had letters in his hand from the chief priests back in Jerusalem that if he found anybody that was a Christian, he could arrest them on the spot, haul them off to jail, and lots of times those people probably never made it out of the jail. They would be put to death for that. That's how much he hated these people that were called Christians.

And yet there were things that were goading him, things that God used to make him stop and think along the way, because there came a day when he was going on the road to Damascus, and there was that bright light right at noon, and it struck him down, and he saw, he got a vision, a sight of a resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. And from one minute, he was a man who made it his life's mission to persecute everyone that called themselves a Christian. But instead now, because he had seen the risen Lord, instead of persecuting, he just didn't let the people off.

He joined in with those people and became one of the greatest gospel preachers there were in the world. What changed that? How could he go from someone who's so against the gospel to the greatest preacher of the gospel? What was it? He had seen a resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. Listen, the Lord Jesus really rose from the dead.

We talk about that. We don't really think of it, but just imagine. If you were to go to a funeral today, somebody you knew was buried today, and you get home and you've been mourning for a few days.

I think we heard it this weekend already. You've been mourning for a few days about this person, and then there's a knock at the door, and you open the door, and there's that person that you've seen buried. You've seen him dead.

You've seen him buried, and he's standing at the door. You would hardly be able to believe your eyes. If you didn't run away, you'd probably poke, make sure it wasn't just a ghost or something, and you find out it was real.

What kind of effect would that have on you? Well, that's exactly what the Lord Jesus did. He was dead. He had died.

He was buried, but oh, he was raised from the dead to proclaim that God was satisfied with the work of his son. Listen, boys and girls, older ones, what makes the message of the gospel different than any other message you will ever hear? It's a message that, first off, starts from the throne of God. It is a message that's backed up with the power of God in that God raised the Lord Jesus from the dead.

It really happened. It wasn't a myth, and he did die for your sins. That's what Paul says.

I delivered unto you, first of all, that which I also received. Paul said, listen, this is exactly what I believe. I'm not trying to sell you a bill of goods here.

He says, this is the gospel that saved me that can save you. I delivered unto you, first of all, that which I also received, how that Christ died. Christ died for our sins.

Oh, sins are the problem. It's our sins that will keep us out of heaven. It's our sins that impede communion and fellowship with God, and yet Christ died for our sins.

According to the scriptures, the word of God had promised it. The word of God was coming to pass, and God said, I'm gonna prove. I'm gonna put my stamp on it to show you that it's the only way, and it's the perfect way in that God said, I'm gonna raise you, raise the Lord Jesus from the dead, and he did, and he proved it by many infallible proofs.

So you see now, we're responsible for what we're gonna do that. There's no one gonna be able to blame God and say, you know what, it was... I just couldn't understand the brochure, you know. The instructions, you know, they were so hard.

You know, step one, step... And all these... No, it's not like that. It's so simple. We have the fact.

Christ died. He died. The reason he died, for your sins, and according to the scriptures, and he was buried, and he rose again the third day, according to the scriptures.

You know what, every one of us, whether we're Christian or whether we're not saved yet, every one of us is one day gonna see a real resurrected man. We'll see him. Those of us that are saved, I tell you, it's gonna be a wonderful day.

To fall at his feet, to worship him, and to thank him personally, personally for the... Oh, I've thanked him many times, but to personally thank him in his presence for dying for my sins, for loving me enough to go to a cross, to suffer the indignities of crucifixion, and death, and burial. But to do that for me, I tell you, it's gonna be a wonderful day. I'll be able to thank him.

But there's another day coming, and people who say, oh, it's all a myth. People who won't believe the authority of the word of God saying he didn't really die, and if he did die, he wasn't raised from the dead. They are going to be compelled to stand before the Lord Jesus Christ and won't be there appreciating him as Savior.

But in that day, you'll stand before him, and he'll be judge. And it wouldn't be a terrible thing that as he holds out that nail-pierced hand, and you understand that that was the same man who was on the cross. That was the man that had died for sins, and I knew about it.

I heard about it. I memorized verses about it, and yet I never trusted the word of God. I never believed the clear word of God.

And in that day, instead of that hand saying, welcome home. You know what those hands will be saying then? They'll be saying, depart. Depart.

I never knew you. Oh, tonight the gospel is good news. The gospel that I declared unto you, Paul says.

Good news. Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. He was buried, and he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.

I love that passage. You know why? Maybe you remember why from the last time I was here. Because that was the same verses that on June 4th, 1971, twelve and a half years old, last night of four weeks of gospel meetings, God opened my eyes, and I saw that Christ just didn't die for our sins.

I realized that night that Christ died for my sins. Oh, he died for you. He wants to be your savior tonight.

And in spite of what the world is trying to tell you, don't believe the world. Believe the word of God. According to the scriptures, Christ died for your sins.

We've come to the end of the conference. I think we've heard the word of God administered to us.