The Jesus Road To Salvation

Thank you. Okay, well good morning everyone. It's good to be with you.

There's a verse in 1 Corinthians 15, I think it is, that says, Your labor is not in vain in the Lord. Sometimes we wonder if our labor is in vain. We've talked about some things this morning already, things we want to do.

We've prayed some prayers. We wonder sometimes are our prayers in vain. Here's a little encouraging email I received.

This is from Dale Eby, works on the same phone team that I do, taking calls from the billboard line. Two years ago, in 21, he got a call from this lady named Gosia. I think I'm saying that right.

And she had called back in 2021 and they maintained contact between then and now. And he just asked her, he said, hey, how are you doing? Are you still serving the Lord? Would you ever consider just writing down your testimony? He thinks that would be a good thing. So she writes back and she gives her testimony starting back that time almost two years ago.

She says, Hi Dale. I reached out to you when I saw your billboard on my drive down to Florida. I was trying to get clean after 15 years of using drugs and alcohol, and nothing had worked up until that point.

I was defeated and desperate. Something told me if I didn't change my life, I would be dead very soon. I didn't know it at the time, but it was God that guided me to your billboards.

After our conversation, I joined Narcotics Anonymous and began working a 12-step program. Part of that program was establishing a relationship with God, something I had turned away from many years ago. It was difficult for me.

I was broken and beaten down in life. I thought there's no way that God exists, or else why would there be so much evil and pain in this world? It was terrifying to believe in something again. What if I was wrong? What if God hated me or was mad at me? Many questions such as these ran through my head.

When the pain finally got great enough, I decided I had nothing to lose. I thought maybe just making the decision to pray and follow God would somehow make my life better, even if I didn't know how it would work. So I started to pray.

I didn't know how to pray, so I just began having conversations with God like a friend would confide in another friend. And to my amazement, amazing things began happening in my life. It's as if questions were answered and problems and burdens lessened by God when I prayed.

It was all the evidence I needed to continue on my spiritual journey. My relationship with God develops and strengthens every day, but I also work on that relationship. I now know that God never left me, never abandoned me.

It was me who ran away. Today, I stay and I pray. You know, when you hear a testimony like that, it's a confirmation.

You know, we know it's true. God hears and answers prayer. We know that the gospel that we share will not return void if we share it faithfully and do what God wants us to do.

But sometimes our faith grows a little bit weak and we wonder, God, are you really at work? How much more of this labor do we need to go through to really see your hand? But a testimony like that is an encouragement. We're going to talk this morning about, at least for a little while, about this thing of salvation. Now, I didn't know Benjamin was going to share that in the children's lesson, but it gives an excellent background to some of what we're going to talk about.

And when it comes to salvation and Christianity, I don't know what you think of. You want to explain Christianity to somebody else. How would you go about doing it? The problem is, like was shared in the children's lesson, there's true Christianity, but there's also false doctrine Christianity.

There's also other things mixed in other than the true gospel of Jesus Christ. Now, how do we determine what is what? How do we determine what is pure and what is the fake? What is the genuine? What is the false? And so I have things in my life that I try to do. Now, there's things that I believe, and this is going to be from my perspective.

And if you go down the road to another church, they would get up and they would share what they believe is the true gospel of salvation. And so it may be different. But we're going to, you know, how would we ever portray this? Well, I can tell you what I do many times when I'm talking to people and say, what do you want? If you want to know what true Christianity is, here's something I would recommend to you.

And I offer them, first of all, I tell them, well, go to the Bible. Just pick up the pure words of Jesus. Start in the book of Matthew.

Just start working your way through the New Testament. At least get through the book of Matthew and start there. That's a lot of times what I do.

Get started right with the words of Jesus. There's another thing I do, though. And that is, I said, if you want to read what I have found to be an extremely good help in explaining what Christianity is, explaining what salvation is, explaining this faith that we proclaim to the world, I'd say, go get a copy of the book, The Kingdom That Turned the World Upside Down by David Brousseau.

How many have ever read this? Raise your hand if you've read it. A lot of you have read it. I read it years ago.

It's been quite a few years since I read it. And sometimes I take for granted that what I believe I have somehow communicated to my children. But I wonder, well, maybe that isn't true.

So here, just a few months ago, I picked up this book again. I said, I'm going to read this to my children in our family devotions. And so we've been reading a few minutes every day, you know, 10, 15 minutes a day.

Just a chapter out of this or part of a chapter out of this, just working our way through it, sharing with them. Now, I hope they've already read it, but I don't trust that they've already read it. So to make sure that they eventually get through it, we're going to do it while they're there.

And so that's what we've been doing. And we touched on a lot of things. One of the things David Brousseau does is a little bit what Benjamin was doing with the children.

He wasn't only portraying the truth from the Bible. But in order to really grasp it, there needs sometimes to be a contrast. We need to set up what some people say and then put that up beside what the Bible says so that you can see the differences.

If you only put this up, without that contrast, people may never know that there's even two different or three or four or five different Gospels, quote-unquote, out there that are being proclaimed. And so that's what he does a very good job of doing, is lining up what is often proclaimed as the Gospel in America, and then putting it up beside what Jesus really said, and then you can see the contrast, and then you can know. Now, that's not to badmouth other people.

I personally know many people who hold and preach a different Gospel, a different version of the Gospel, maybe different details of the Gospel than what I would like for them to be saying. And I also know that there is enough truth in there that people are responding to it. Maybe we could call it, instead of a false Gospel, we could call it an incomplete Gospel.

I think sometimes people are doing it with good motives, and they're preaching Jesus, and they're preaching, turn away from your sin and come here, and come to Jesus, and people are doing it. And they're responding in a saving way, even though I look at what they're preaching and saying, it's not complete. It doesn't have all the aspects in there.

And sometimes I even really squirm when I see them putting something in that doesn't belong. It's that part that I say, that sounds dangerous to me. So I can say both those things at the same time.

God can use, in the weakness of our flesh, things that we have wrong in our mind. If we do it with humility, God can still use us, even if we don't have everything straight. But the other thing is still true, that that thing that's not straight is still dangerous, potentially dangerous, and we need to know the difference between the two.

Those two things can both be true at the same time. So we're going to talk about this a little bit this morning. There was two chapters that jumped out at me as I was reading through this, and we're not through.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through with my family. But I got to two chapters, chapter 17, which is called The Jesus Road to Salvation, and then chapter 18, which says How to Enter the Kingdom of God. And those are the two that jumped out at me.

I said, I would like to really share this, whether this becomes the whole sermon or whether it's a pre-sermon. I'm not sure yet, but at least for a pre-sermon, talk about what The Jesus Road to Salvation is. Before I talk about The Jesus Road to Salvation, I've got to talk about a different gospel, a gospel that is being preached in a lot of places in America, probably around the world, but for sure in America.

I'm going to call it Easy Believism. That's what David Berceau calls it in his book, Easy Believism. And to promote this thing of Easy Believism, there is a lot of times a path that's taken that is called The Roman's Road to Salvation.

People say, oh, you want to know how to get saved? Great, let's go to the book of Romans. And by the way, I love the book of Romans, but the way this is done leaves out some very important things. Even brings in some things that are dangerous.

And it takes a person through the book of Romans, says, hey, you're a sinner, but if you believe by faith that Jesus is God and that He died and rose again, you're going to be saved. And then once you're saved by believing, that's all you need to do is believe. Once you've believed, you can never lose that salvation.

You're going to be saved forever because the faith that you put in Jesus gets you some things. It gets you forgiveness of sins you've committed in the past. It gets you forgiveness of sins that you're committing today.

It also gets you forgiveness of all the sins you're ever going to commit in the future by believing in Jesus. That's what this gospel preaches, the gospel of what we call Easy Believism. There is another piece that is often gone along with it, not always, not everybody teaches this, but the idea that God will arbitrarily choose who gets to be saved and who doesn't ahead of time.

That's called popular Calvinism, unconditional election. Sometimes it's called the idea that God chooses arbitrarily who's going to be saved and who's not. Now I have a question for you.

Does God choose who's saved and who's not? The answer is yes, He does. He chooses who's going to be saved and who's not. But there's a word I inserted in there that doesn't belong.

It's the word arbitrary. God does not arbitrarily choose who's to be saved and who's not. So why are you making a big deal of the word arbitrary? I don't even know what the word arbitrary means.

Maybe some of you are saying, so what does the word arbitrary mean? Somebody say it. Does anybody know? How would you describe the word arbitrary? Without cause. Without a connection to something before it.

Okay, so it's just arbitrary. It's by chance perhaps. You know, God's up there flipping coins.

This guy's saved, that guy's not. Throws it out, whatever. Is that how God? No, that's not how God does it.

God chooses, but it is not arbitrary. It's not without a cause. There are causes ahead of time.

There's causes that God is choosing. Now, let's just imagine for a moment that it was arbitrary. That God was going to say, okay, great, I'm just going to make a choice, and everybody's going to have to submit to this choice, and I'm going to just choose who gets to be saved and who gets to be lost.

If that were to happen, who would God choose? Would He choose by the color of your skin? Would He choose by how rich you are, how poor you are? If it was arbitrary, who would God choose, and who would He leave out? The answer's in the Bible, by the way, who God would choose if it was arbitrary. Anybody know? It would be everyone. Because God's not willing that any should perish.

He wants everybody to come to salvation. So if it was arbitrary, God would pick everybody, the whole world, every human on earth, to be saved, and zero people to be lost. Now, we know that that's not what God has done.

He has instead set up salvation and the gospel in such a way that there is a sorting process going on between those who'll be saved and those who'll be lost. It's not that everybody will be saved. Some people believe that, but it's one of those false doctrines we heard about earlier, that everybody's going to be saved.

But instead, there's a sorting process that is going on. Now, I'm going to turn here to chapter 17 and just go through some of this a little bit. But the Jesus Road to Salvation.

Now, I used to work in a grass seed warehouse. Some of you have also worked in a grass seed warehouse. They had this cleaner there, and this cleaner would take this dirty grass seed from off the field, and it would send it through a series of screens.

And so, you'd have all this grass seed pouring in from the top, and then you'd have a screen, and then another screen, and then another screen. And the seed that would go all the way through to the bottom, that would be the good, clean seed here on the pile. That's the stuff that would be saved.

Meanwhile, this other stuff would be sorted off. Now, it's not quite true, because actually some of these screens are letting the good seed pass through, and some of them are letting the bad seed pass through. But for the sake of this illustration, let's just say you need all three of these screens.

The good seed goes through, and the bad seed pours off here, and it gets discarded. But the good seed pours all the way through these three screens down to the bottom. God has screens as well.

And He is sorting us as humans to determine who is it that's going to spend eternity with Him. Who is it that will be part of His kingdom? And God wants to fill His kingdom with who? With that small minority of humankind who really love Him. That's who God wants to be with.

There was a time that God had a heaven full of beings that some of them loved Him and some of them didn't. Lucifer was one of those beings in heaven with Him. Lucifer raised himself up in pride, and he said, Hey, I will be like the Most High.

And according to Revelation, it appears as though he swept a third of the stars, angels, with him. Is that how it was exactly? I don't know. But the way it seems to have happened is that Lucifer said, Come on, let's start a rebellion.

Let me be God. And one third of the angels said, We're going with you. And they were kicked out of heaven.

But two thirds stayed with God. So God now, He's, I don't know, repopulating heaven. Could you say that? Is that what He's doing with us as humans? But He says, I'm going to give you some tests beforehand.

I'm reading a lot into this, I know. So if you disagree with my theology, that's fine. But I'm going to repopulate heaven with people who truly love me now.

And instead of getting up to heaven and then deciding then which way I'm going, you decide down here on earth which way you're going, so that I know by the time you are ushered into the eternal kingdom of God, you will have already made that choice. That seems to be what is going on here. Do I know that for sure? No, I kind of think that.

But I'm not sure exactly that has all the... I'm pretty sure there's details that are left out of that. But it seems like that's kind of what's happening. So God has these tests that He passes people through.

And to see where they're going to end up. Now tests is nothing new. God had tests for Noah.

He had tests for Adam. He had tests for Abraham. God says in Acts 14, we must through... Paul says that we must through many trials and tribulations enter the kingdom of God.

Psalms 11 says the Lord tests the righteous. Psalm 17 says the refining pot is for silver and the furnace for gold, but the Lord tests the hearts. And Psalm 7, the righteous God tests the hearts and the minds.

So what are these tests that we've got to pass through to see whether or not we're going to be qualified for the good seed? The good seed that's going to be with God forever. Well, the first test is faith. And most people fail that right there.

They say, I'm not going to put my faith in something I can't say. I'm not going to believe in God. But many, many people do pass the test.

The majority don't, but there's still many people that do pass this test. They put their faith in God. They make an initial commitment to God, and the seed passes on through.

They pass the test of faith. But it's not the final test. There's another test.

This is the test of commitment. The test of commitment. Many people who pass the test of faith get down here to the test of commitment, and they turn back.

It doesn't pan out like they thought it was going to pan. They thought life was going to get better, and it didn't get better. And there's hard things that come into their life.

And they say, no, I'm not going to keep going. But this thing of commitment, it's all through. Jesus talked about it over and over again.

He talked about people. Are they going to be willing to give up everything? Are they going to be willing to suffer? He says in John 10, Most assuredly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs in some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. A lot of people, they climb over walls and try to steal the citizenship that way.

But they need to go through that test to be genuine. Matthew 22 says, Many are called, but few are chosen. He talks about the man there that entered into the wedding feast, and he cast him out.

Why don't you have a wedding garment? Again, he didn't have that garment of commitment. The third one is obedience. The first part of this book talks about some of the commands of Jesus that many Christians today are ignoring.

Commands about honesty and swearing oaths. Commands about non-resistance and turning the other cheek, loving our enemies. Commands about divorce.

We heard about that a little bit this morning, right? Divorce and remarriage. Commands about wealth and what we do with our money and so forth. Those are not popular commands.

Even in Christianity, they're not. But Jesus is testing us. Will you put your faith in me? Thank you.

Once you put your faith in me, will you stay committed through thick and through thin? Thank you. And once you face that test of obedience, are you going to pass that test of obedience? He talks about this thing of easy believism, which, you know, the gospel that says all you have to do is believe on me once, and after that you can never lose your salvation because after all you put your faith in me, and many people hold that as the gospel truth. So what happens if you go into an average church who believes that and teaches what Jesus taught? What did Jesus teach? Well, Jesus said the sins you commit each day will not be forgiven unless you forgive other people their sins.

For a lot of people, that's heresy. Well, here's another thing that Jesus said. To be saved, a person must live by the teachings of Jesus.

A lot of people say that's heresy too. To be saved, you only need to believe. Faith alone is the battle cry many times.

Jesus said you have to live by the teachings of Jesus to be saved. Matthew chapter 25. If we don't feed the hungry and clothe the poor, we will not see heaven.

Again, that sounds like a work salvation that many people decry as false, but Jesus seemingly said it. He said it very clearly there. Matthew 25, there's going to be a sorting that's going on.

And so he talks about faith, commitment, obedience, those three screens that people need to pass through, but there's going to be good seed that will pass the test. And what's the goal of all this? The goal is a relationship with Jesus. Do we have that relationship with our King? And that's what God wants.

He wants us to have a relationship with Him because He wants to spend eternity with people who truly love Him, people who have made it through those three screens of the seed cleaner, so to speak, and come out the other side tried and true, and the love is even stronger than it was when we first entered. Now, there are things that the devil will come along and come up with this thing of fake obedience. You say, what's fake obedience? Well, a lot of times you talk to Christians and say, hey, you need to obey Jesus.

Yeah, for sure, I do, yep. But in their minds, they're thinking something different than what I'm thinking when I tell them you should obey Jesus. In their minds, they're saying this obedience that I think is, okay, yep, I'm going to wake up in the morning, and I'm going to cock my ear, and I'm going to listen.

And if I hear Jesus talking in my heart, I'll do what He says. I didn't hear Jesus today, so I'll listen again tomorrow. Tomorrow, I get this little feeling.

I think Jesus is telling me to go to work today. Okay, so I'll go to work today. I've obeyed Jesus.

And you have these subjective impulses that some of them come into my mind, some of them come into your mind, some of them come into your mind, and we all say, just keep your ears tuned. You're going to hear Jesus today. Do what He says.

Now, does that mean those impulses are wrong? No, they're not wrong. God does use those impulses sometimes. But when Jesus said, go and teach others, He didn't say go and baptize them and teach them to obey those subjective impulses that keep popping into their minds.

He said, go and teach them to obey the things I've commanded you. So we have what Jesus said already. It's written.

And when Jesus is talking about obedience, He's talking about obey the things I've already given you. But the problem is a lot of things Jesus has given just don't sit well in American Christianity. What He said about divorce isn't popular.

What He said about wealth isn't popular. What He said about nonresistance or not swearing oaths, that's not a very popular thing. So instead, we get this idea, well, I'll just, instead of doing what Jesus already told me to do, I'll ignore those things and I'll just cock my ears and see if I get these impulses and I'll do that kind of obedience instead.

But that's no substitute for listening and reading what Jesus has already said. Let's be faithful to what He's already said. So that's chapter 17.

How to enter the kingdom of God, chapter 18. Again, I didn't realize we were going to be talking about this in the Bible study. But how to enter the kingdom of God.

Four steps that He gives here. I've often given people three steps. But He adds a fourth one, so I'm going to go with what He says.

So if you were to think about what are the four steps to entering the kingdom of God, what would you say? Go ahead and call it out. Repent. What's another one? Belief.

Obey. I'm going to hold off on that one a little bit. There's not one that He put down here, but I think it's coming.

The third one would be baptism. And the fourth one, receiving the Holy Spirit. Repent.

Believe. He actually switches those around from the order I would have. He would have said, believe the message of Jesus, first of all.

And then repent. Then be baptized. Then receive the Holy Spirit.

He says, after these steps, they enter the kingdom of God. Okay, fair enough. Those are pretty well... They come up often enough that probably there wouldn't be a lot of disagreement about those things.

Those are part of entering the kingdom of God. Now, according to the gospel of easy believism, that's it. You've repented.

You've believed. You've been baptized. You've received the Holy Spirit.

And it's the end of the matter. It's a one-step program. Once that step has happened, forgiveness of sins has happened for all my past sins.

It's happening right now for my current sins. And it's going to happen for anything I do in the future because of that one act of believing in Jesus. But he says the gospel of the kingdom is not a one-step program.

There's two aspects of salvation. We can read the passages that talk about the past aspect of salvation. So I'll just put up here, just so we don't get these two things confused, we've got the past and we've got the future.

And if you really want to dig into it, you could probably break those down even more because there's also the present perfect tense, I believe it is, a verb that says are being saved and so forth. But to keep things simple, let's just talk about the past and the future aspect of salvation. The past aspect.

And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved. For by grace you, past tense, have been saved. Not of yourselves, it's a gift of God.

For we were saved in this hope, Ephesians 2.8. I'm sorry, I think that's Romans 8. We were saved. So past tense. It was an event in our life.

And I think many people here would say I have experienced that event, past tense. But what about the future aspect of salvation? The future aspect, you know, there's lots of verses that talks about that as well. Matthew 10.22. You will be hated of all for my name's sake, but he who endures to the end will be saved.

I'm the vine, you're the branches. He who abides in me bears much fruit. For without me you can do nothing.

If anyone doesn't abide in me, he's cast out as a branch, withered. They gather them, they throw them into the fire, they're burned. Every branch in me that he doesn't bear fruit, he takes away.

So again, there's the two sides. One side's saved in the future. All of these people were saved in the past.

They all went through the past salvation. But in the future, some will be saved, some will be lost if they don't bear the fruit. He who overcomes shall be clothed in white garments.

I will not blot out his name out of the book of life. We'll confess his name before the Father and his angels. Just because our names were in the book of life at our new birth, we can't presume that they're going to stay there.

So there's so many warnings about that past and future, the past tense and the future tense. So here's the thing, though, that sometimes there's miscommunication. Even among those who believe pretty much everything that we got up here on the board, you have Christians that come along with a confusion about this.

They fail to recognize that there's a past and a future aspect of salvation. And so let me just read this illustration. There's Christian number one, Christian number two.

Both Christian number one, Christian number two, they love Jesus. They live by his teachings. They have put their faith in him.

They're committed to obey him. They want to obey him. They believe in obedience.

So here's what it says. Christian number one's a kingdom Christian who loves Jesus, lives by his teachings, but he belongs to a church that emphasizes the future aspect of salvation. Christian number two likewise loves and obeys Jesus, but he belongs to a church that emphasizes the past aspect of salvation.

So in both churches, in reality, they both believe both aspects of salvation, but they don't put an equal emphasis on the two. One of them emphasizes one. One of them emphasizes the other.

So here comes Christian number two. Walks up to Christian number one. Brother, have you been saved? Christian number one says, what do you mean? Have I been saved? Of course not.

It would be presumptuous for anyone to say he's already saved. Jesus will make that determination once I die. Christian number two, well, if you don't know now that you have already been saved, it'll be too late for you when you die.

You're holding a false gospel. Christian number one, no. You're the one holding the false gospel.

It's a gospel of presumption. You ever hear a conversation like that before? It might sound like these two Christians are light years apart in their beliefs, and perhaps they truly are, but often their beliefs are quite similar. If they're truly kingdom Christians, each one of their churches probably holds to both the past and the future aspects of salvation.

Yet because each church emphasizes one over the other, their members have a confused understanding of salvation. They can't clearly articulate the gospel of the kingdom, even though they hold to it in their hearts. Asking someone, have you been saved, is like asking a person, have you quit stealing from your employer? An honest employee can't answer that question with a simple yes or no, can he? He can only thwart the deceptive question by saying, I never have stolen from my employer, so there's nothing to quit.

The salvation question is just as deceptive, although unintentionally so. A simple yes or no will not suffice. Someone who understands the gospel of the kingdom must counter the inherent deceptiveness of this question by saying, Yes, I was saved at my new birth, but my final salvation won't be determined until I have endured to the end.

So that's, again, it's an argument. Again, understanding these things I think can be very powerful, very valuable. So that's just a little refresher maybe.

I hope it's a refresher. I hope maybe for some of you it was brand new. Maybe you never saw the contrast between easy believism and the kingdom gospel of salvation.

But maybe that will help you articulate. Maybe it will help you understand it. Maybe it will help you hopefully practice it and believe it and follow it in your own heart.

A couple of weeks ago I started a study of a different book. It's the book Where Is Lazarus? I had read it. I thought I'm going to share some with you.

It was kind of a last-minute thing that we had talked about. But it basically is a book warning people through the story of the rich man and Lazarus how Lazarus, I'm sorry, the rich man, was shocked to find himself in Hades, in hell, in torment at the end of his days after he died. He was shocked.

He didn't know he was going to end up there. As far as we knew, he was a well-practicing Jewish believer. Maybe he was even a Christian.

Maybe Jesus was projecting this parable into the future. But he was a religious man. He knew Abraham.

He called him Father. And he was shocked to find out at the end of life what his relation to God really was. And so I shared a few of those thoughts from that.

I'd like to share some more. And the part that we're in right now, the part that I've been going through, is just the part that it talks about wealth and prosperity, which we live in, by the way. If you live in America, you're surrounded by wealth and prosperity.

What are the warnings that Jesus gives about that wealth and prosperity? I think I'm going to take this off and put it up there. How does it affect us as we go through life? How can we be affected by this? And again, there's a burden on my heart because as I look at Scripture and I look at people who are going to be disappointed, I talk to people on the billboards all the time who are planning to go to hell. They don't have any idea what that means.

They have no idea of the torment that's ahead of them. But that's their plan because the idea of becoming a Christian, giving up some of the things they know they would have to give up, just is so foreign to them. They say, hey, I don't care.

I'm just going to go for sin. And that's what I'm going to do. But when we're in a group like this, we're talking to people who expect to go to heaven.

And as I look at things that's going to bring disappointment after judgment, there's a list of them that are heavy on my heart. I have a very heavy thought when I think about the world and the technology that we have. I have a heavy heart when I think about some of the false doctrines that we've talked about.

I have a heavy heart when it comes to what Jesus said about the subject of wealth. And so I'm going to put up here on the board some of the things just to know what can prosperity do to us and how do we watch out for it. Number one, he says prosperity, we forget God.

Think about the Israelites walking through the wilderness and God has all these promises for them and says, you know, right now you're relying on this manna. Every day, that's all you have is the manna. In fact, if they gather two days' worth of manna, it would go bad on them.

They didn't have a lot, but they survived by the provision of God and they were constantly being reminded of God. But he says, you're going to come into a land where you're going to have grain, you're going to have fruit, you're going to have an abundance, watch out. Prosperity will tend to make you forget God.

And there's just a quote. Oh, he talks about, if we were to quote the Lord's Prayer together, we would say, Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Then we have this little phrase, give us today our daily bread.

How many times do we really pray that from our heart? Not very often, at least I don't. I say, well, I hope my wife goes to town and gets a whole week's worth of groceries and we can up a whole year's worth of stuff and we butcher a cow and have a freezer. Anyway, daily bread isn't, it's easy to forget that this all came from God when we have so much.

That's what prosperity tends to do. A quote from a man named Cotton Mather. He says, religion begat prosperity and the daughter devoured the mother.

Religion. So the good morals that we have seem to create prosperity and God poured his blessing, but then that very prosperity devoured the mother, the very faith that brought it into being. Number two, we forget history.

We forget why things are the way they are. We forget that we're standing on the shoulders of others. We got stuff all around us and we think, hey, this is great.

But you know, things weren't always this way and even today they aren't still this way in many places. There's a, back during the gold rush, there was a group of people that found gold in the city, in the country, in the state of California and they send out these telegrams, say, hey, there's gold here in California. Everybody started for the west.

You know, they got up, they bought these wagons and all these picks and shovels and said, we're going to California. There's gold there. And out across the prairie they went.

They said that even one man, they saw him pushing a wheelbarrow out across the prairie with a couple of shovels in there. I don't know how far he made it. I don't know how far a lot of these people made it, but they're heading for California.

Well, the problem was when they got to California, there was, they started, you know, setting up camp here. Well, whose land is this? There was no way to define it. So the only thing they could do is just stay awake all night with their guns loaded to keep people off of what now they considered to be their land.

Well, that was pretty sleepless. So they'd band together with people around them and say, okay, that's your land, this is mine, I'll watch yours, you watch mine, we'll band together. And what they eventually had to do was start to title this land.

They'd mark it out, they'd say this is yours, and the entire government of California, maybe the United States government, will defend your right to this land that you've staked out for yourself. Do you know that ability to title land is a very rare ability in the world? America, we can do it, but a lot of the world, like 30% of the world, they don't have, it's only 30% that does have that ability. The rest of the world, land is a little bit like the air.

I took an airplane ride with my brother-in-law, Tim Miller, when he was here, and we went flying up through this, up and down the valley, came flying over our place and back to the airport, and it was kind of fun, but nobody came out with a gun and said, hey, you're flying over my airspace. The airspace was everybody's, you see. It used to be that way here in America with the land, the American Indians.

It's dirt. You can't own dirt. I mean, come on.

Everybody owns it. The buffalo roam across it. You can own a buffalo if you shoot it, but you can't own dirt, land.

That's the way it is still with the air that we have. It used to be that way with the land, but the ability to title land now is a lot of the reason America is as prosperous as it is. You can mark out this, and you can say that's my land, and therefore if I build a house on that land, it's my house, and they can build up wealth in many ways that way, but we take it for granted.

We don't understand this was handed to us. If I'm prosperous, things are going well for me, I just kind of take it for granted that I've done it myself, but it's actually building on the shoulders of many other people. Number three, we forget the value of our neighbors.

I'll just put up here neighbors. These are things, again, that happen, that tend to happen when prosperity comes. Hopefully, they don't have to happen.

Several years ago, I was in Nicaragua with a few other Americans. It was late in the evening. We were visiting a missionary's small living room.

The shutters were open with no glass in the windows, and the sounds of the jungle drifted in with the darkness as we talked. Our host was telling us about a robbery that had taken place several years before. Suddenly, in the middle of his story, a man's face unexpectedly filled the open window.

The Nicaraguan peered in and was as shocked to see visitors as we were to see him. The American woman sitting next to the window was the most startled of all. The Nicaraguan jungle wasn't in her comfort zone to start with, and the stories of past robberies didn't help.

The sudden interruption was the icing on the cake, and she shrieked as she jumped from her chair. This, of course, amused the unannounced visitor, and he smiled widely. A gold tooth glinting in the dim light.

Popping in on a neighbor was normal in his culture, and this exciting turn of events was certainly worth the price of admission. In fact, amid the ensuing laughter and the excited chatter, he momentarily forgot the urgency of his mission. His wife was in the middle of childbirth, and he finally remembered, and things weren't going well.

He needed help to deliver their new baby. In the Nicaraguan jungle, that's what neighbors are for. But in our world, many times, that's not what neighbors are for.

You stay out of my hair, I'll stay out of your hair, I'll find my own ride to the hospital, and so forth. So prosperity can make us forget what neighbors are really for. Another one, discontent.

We have so many choices, and when we have so many choices, it's easy to get in our minds in the middle of prosperity that I deserve the very best. He tells a story about this psychologist, Barry Swartz, and he'd go to Wal-Mart to buy jeans, and you'd go there and you'd buy jeans. Now you've got all kinds.

You've got the bell bottoms, you've got the stone wash, and you've got the slightly faded, and the really faded, and not faded, and you've got all these different options. And the full cut, and the ones for bigger people, and the ones for not so big people. Anyway, he found the perfect set of jeans, and he walked away thinking, I kind of deserve this.

This is what we have. Anyway, so that's another thing. Discontent.

So many options, so many choices. All right? Another thing it does, and I'm just going through kind of chapter by chapter. Chapter 13, we're going, I think, 11, 12, anyway.

Maybe I'll start back a little bit, but another thing that prosperity tends to do, it makes us arrogant. How many have ever played the game of Monopoly? Raise your hand. A lot of you.

Okay, I've played it. I used to play it a lot when I was young. Not sure it was good for me, but I did it anyway.

Well, some researchers decided they're going to try out the game of Monopoly. So they called 100 people from, I think, from a college and said, okay, we're going to divide you up into groups of, I think they just had two people per game, I think. Anyway, so they divided up two people per game, so they got 50 different Monopoly games going on, each in a separate room with a camera trained.

Now, they didn't know about the camera, but they put them in this room, and they said, before we play, we're going to flip a coin, and whoever wins the coin toss is going to get some special privileges in this Monopoly game. First of all, normally, I think Monopoly, you start out with like $1,500. Okay, well, if you get heads, you're going to get 3,000.

One of you is going to get double the money. Secondly, every time that person goes around Go, he collects double what the other guy does. And when he has to collect rent, he's going to get double the normal price of rent.

And he also gets to play with two dice instead of one, so he can buzz in around the board quicker. And, so, okay, flip the coin, fine, okay, you get it, you don't. So, they just play a game of Monopoly with his camera trained on him.

And what they find out is that as time went on, the guy who was obviously winning, I mean, with everything tilted in his favor, it's a no-brainer who's going to win this Monopoly game. But, he started to get a little bit cocky about this. He forgot that it had been just handed to him, this advantage.

And he started, you know, he was given twice as much money, he was, he was, even though both players knew it wasn't a fair game, their attitude was different at the end. The guy who was winning, the rich ones, he would go, he would move around the board more aggressively, smacking their pieces on the board, you know, like, hey, this is what we're doing. And he just had this cocky attitude about him.

And he became a little bit rude and insensitive toward the other guy. And then, you know, he was bragging about how many property, how much property he had and starting to make these little obnoxious comments. And then they did an interview after the game was all over.

And obviously, the winner, you know, the guy was, who got all the advantages, he won. But, you know, then they would interview him. Well, he kept talking about all the good moves he made.

You know, I bought that property and then I chose to do that and put houses on it. You know, like, it's his credit, somehow. It wasn't his credit.

He won the coin toss. You know, that was what happened. But that's how we do.

And that's how we do in America. We tend to think, hey, I'm doing well. Things are good.

I must have earned something that the poor guy over in Nicaragua or Haiti, he didn't do. You know, I must have a reason for this. There's a reason God is blessing me.

Chapter 14. What happens, is another thing that happens. We forget Lazarus.

The fact is, Lazarus does exist. The poor people of this world do exist. The people that have very, very little.

You know, they've done studies on this. They've done studies on how it impacts them. And here's what they did.

They gave everybody a car and said, okay, go drive this car down the highway. And then they had other people stationed there as pedestrians along these roads. Actually, maybe they just had the pedestrians.

That's all they had to do, just with a camera. And so these people walking, come walking up to the sidewalk and cameras way behind them, trained on them. And they're testing to see how many people will stop and let the guy walking go ahead.

How many people are polite, in other words. And so they got all this data and they found out that for every one, they had all these cars. Some of them stopped, some of them didn't.

Some of them, no, I'm going first. Oh, no, go ahead. Go across.

But the people, for every thousand dollars in value of the car going up, they were 3% less likely to stop and let the guy walk. In other words, people with rich cars thought, I get to go first. And as the value went up, the politeness went down.

And it's just kind of an interesting thing. We don't think it happens to us, but it's just a subtle thing that happens to us to make us somewhat arrogant. He tells about an airplane ride.

He said one time he was flying overseas and he gets up there to the counter. He wants to go on this airplane and he tells the people at the gate, here's my flight. Can you assign me a seat? She says, sorry, we're full.

And do you have a coach seat? He says, there's no more. He said, well, maybe you just want to put me in first class then. He was joking.

But she said, well, let me look. And here there was an empty seat in first class. So he gets to sit this long flight, 15 hours or so, in first class.

And after a while, this first class, I mean, they're there, they're with all this. Let me just read it to you. Settling into my luxurious and roomy seat, I looked around with satisfaction.

The spacious desk, the array of buttons and everything provided the utmost comfort. Even the direct lighting seemed to say, we are doing everything possible to ensure you have a pleasant flying experience. I had spent many hours in airplanes and never experienced anything like this.

Long flights usually consist of tight quarters, negotiating elbows for shared armrests and juggling the packaged food on a tiny tray. This was entirely different. He was in Doha, Qatar.

And I had to approach the counter to get my ticket. And they said, hey, you know, I already told that. But at first she says, I didn't think I'd heard her correctly, but it turned out she had.

And she says, you get to fly first class. And he says, but an hour or two into the flight, the attendant kneeling beside me, inquiring if I would prefer beef or lamb, I realized I could easily adapt to this level of luxury. When the excellent meal was over, a single push of a button incredibly converted my seat into a bed.

And the ever obliging flight attendant miraculously reappeared with a blanket and a pillow, dimmed the lights, and wished me a good night's rest. There was no question. This was exactly how traveling should be.

I liked it. Well, a week later, he's on his way home. This time he is in coach, the one he's actually paid for.

And right behind him is a little kid kicking his seat. And he just gets irritated. He turns around.

He calls the flight, hey, do you have another seat? No, we don't have any more seats. You're stuck with that one. And he just is really irritated.

But then he realizes, I didn't pay for that luxury I had on the way over here. I thought I deserved it though. We just get in our heads that we deserve what we really don't deserve, what we really haven't paid for.

And you know, these things, they breed arrogance. And so, let me just read there. It's very easy to, as we go through this section, allow the Spirit of God to examine your life.

It's very easy to forget Lazarus, to make the subtle shift from being followers of Jesus to a people who are just a little unusual and plainly prosperous. We just think we got it coming. We think we deserve it.

We have all these ideas. One last story, then I'll quit. There was a group of people who lived in the 1800s.

Andrew Carnegie was one of them. You probably heard his name. A rich tycoon.

But these people lived in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And it wasn't very pleasant there. It was dirty.

It was hot. It was dusty. And these people wanted a place to get away from it all.

So, they went and bought this place called this dam. This lake with a dam. South Fork Dam and Reservoir.

And this earthen dam, it sat empty for years, or it sat abandoned for years. But they restored it. They built up this dam.

Stocked it with fish. And now they could do their fishing and their hunting up in the mountains. The weather was nice.

These rich people were up there. But the problem was, this dam had these outlets, these 24-inch tubes that came out of the dam to relieve the water. They said, we don't need that.

We don't want these fish to get away. The fishing will be a lot better if we block those off. So, they blocked them off, or pulled them out, whatever, threw them away, and said, let's just enjoy this beautiful time.

Well, as time went on, wintertime came. And these rich men up there by the lake were enjoying themselves when a storm came in. And this storm lasted for day after day after day.

Inch after inch after inch of rain came. And the dam was filling up. And there's no way to empty it.

And meanwhile, the people down in the valley below, there was a town called Johnstown. 30,000 people. And they're getting a little nervous.

They're saying, hey, you guys know what you're doing up there? You know how to keep this dam from overflowing? And they finally decided they did. Went to sleep that night. But that night, the dam broke.

And a wall of water, 40 feet tall, half a mile long, come rushing down that valley and just overwhelmed that town of Johnstown. 2,200 people, over 2,200 people died in the Johnstown flood in the 1800s. And as they started going back through, what did we do wrong? What happened? Why did these people die? Turns out, everything hinged on those 24-inch tubes that were supposed to be the outlet for this massive pile of water that was behind the dam.

And, you know, God has given us these outlets. He's given us an abundance of wealth that can be extremely damaging in many of these ways. But He's also given us outlets.

He's given us these tubes to release the pressure to, excuse me, to help the Lazaruses of this world. And that's what He wants us to do. And if we neglect that, it's going to result in disaster.

It's going to result in arrogance, forgetting God, forgetting history, forgetting our neighbors, discontentment, and we forget Lazarus. So the challenge that Gary wants to give in this book, and there's a few more chapters. I may have one more sermon on this.

We'll see. But he wants to challenge us to open those floodgates and allow the extra he's given us to relieve the pressure and bless others. That's the reason.

He's called us to be a channel, not a reservoir. And so just watch out. We live in a land where these dangers are there.

We forget God. We forget history. We get discontented.

We think we deserve the things that God's given us because after all, we have them and other people don't. But is that what God sees? Or does God see a dam that's building up, building up, and it's going to collapse? It's going to result in disaster. Not only will we be hurt, but a lot of other people will be hurt as well.

Let's bow for prayer. Father, we come to you in the name of Jesus. And I thank you, Lord, for being with us this morning.

I thank you, Lord, for these men, David Bersow, Gary Miller, who have written with burdens on their hearts that there are people in our nation who need to hear a true gospel of Jesus Christ and respond to it, who need to respond to your warnings about wealth and prosperity and the damage that will come if we don't heed the warnings. And Lord, I pray that you would just guide and direct us as we go from this place. Thank you for each one that's gathered here who wants to hear what you have to say to us as a church.

Help us not to be like that church and lay out to see a lukewarm increase with goods, and we think we have need of nothing. Lord, when all the while we are naked and poor and blind and sick and on our way to destruction. So, Father, help us to know truth, to respond to truth, and follow you.

Thank you, in Jesus' name. Amen.