The Despised Christ

Father in heaven, I come before Thee by the blood of Thy dear Son, Jesus, and I ask You, great God, to speak to hearts today to let those within the sound of my voice hear not only me, but I pray that some will hear Your voice as it comes with all power, authority, and majesty. Come, Lord, and disturb folks by Your Spirit. I pray these things in the strong name of Jesus.

Amen. In the book of Isaiah, in chapter 53, we read, He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised and we esteemed him not.

Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. I will stop there, friends. The world is tolerant to God and religion, as long as your God is also the God of the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Islamist, the Mormon.

The world is satisfied with one God for all religions. But the moment you say that the God of the Bible is exclusive to Christianity and intolerant to other religions, you will have a fight on your hands. But if you really want to experience the hatred of mankind, then say that Christ Jesus proclaimed, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No man cometh unto the Father but by me. That Jesus is the only way to heaven, and all other world religions are paved with the stones to hell. And if you want to separate the chaff from the wheat in the institutional evangelical church, then just go ahead and say that Christ must be your Lord, and you must renounce self to him.

That to be a Christian you must submit to Christ's lordship in your daily living. You go get on national television, friend, and tell the world that Jesus is the only way to heaven, and all other ways will end up in hell. That Christ Jesus was crucified on a bloody cross for sin.

That if you want to get to heaven, you must cast yourself at the nail-pieced feet of a bleeding and dying Christ, and own him as your Savior and Lord. That you must be born again, or you will surely end up in eternal damnation. That being born again means that you are not saved by a decision you make, but by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit upon your heart.

You go tell the church world that salvation is in the hands of God and not man, and if you are saved it's because God gave you saving faith, and they'll hate you for sure. You go stand in front of a group of good deacons, and announce to them that God commands all men everywhere to repent, or just go on to hell, and see if they don't rise up in anger against you. The biggest opposition I've had as an evangelist in churches has been the outrage of the deacons who fought me on man's duty of repentance.

You go start telling folks that God is a God who must punish sin, and he is only one who sends people to hell, and you will have a mob riot on your hands because the God of the American church today would never ever send anybody to hell, or God wouldn't act that way. You go stand on a platform and announce to the world that a future judgment awaits all mankind, and that every mother's son will one day stand before the judge of all the earth, and give an account of himself to God, that a holy God will drop his plumb line on every sinner to measure him against the strictness of God's unbending law, and that every man will fail that test because for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, that the severity of God's broken law will result in the sentencing of the law upon all guilty lawbreakers, and if you stand before God and beside God's law in your own merits, you will be cast into a place of everlasting punishment for sin called hell, that if you want to escape hell and pardon of sin, you must stand in the merits of another, the Lord Jesus Christ, that when you come to Christ savingly, you must submit to all his rights and claims on your life through his lordship in a life of discipleship, that to become a means that self is dethroned, and another is enthroned there, the Lord Jesus Christ. I tell you, friends, that Satan hates the name of Jesus.

So if you speak often about Jesus, and the more you mention Jesus, the more you'll be hated as well. Jesus told his disciples, if the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. Most preachers will be fine mentioning God in heaven in their sermons, but very few will preach about a crucified Christ in a place called hell.

The religious world of Christ's day hated him and cried away with him. They collectively shouted, we will not have this man reign over us, and the institutionalized religious world of our day will cry out against the lordship of Christ, object to the doctrines of repentance and regeneration, and will hate you for preaching a crucified Christ who has rights and claims on all followers of his. You can preach Jesus all day long, who is tolerant towards sin, and accommodating to all who follow him and remain in their sins.

But if you begin to preach a Christ who is intolerant to sin, then you will have a fight on your hands, because men love darkness more than light. But if you want Christ's friend, then you must have him as lord. He is a living lord who sits on a throne at the right hand of the father, and he earned that right by way of a bloody cross.

Let us pray.