A 295 b The ABC of Christianity

I'll be reading from the New International Version. The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household.

If any household is too small for a whole lamb they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat. The animals you choose must be year old males without defect and you may take them from the sheep or the goats.

Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month when all the people of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the door frames of the houses where they are to eat the lamb. That same night they are to eat the meat roasted over the fire along with bitter herbs and bread made without yeast.

Do not eat the meat raw or cooked in water but roast it over the fire, head, legs and inner parts. Do not leave any of it till morning. If some of it is left till morning you must burn it.

This is how you are to eat it, with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste, it is the Lord's Passover. On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn, both men and animals, and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt.

I am the Lord. The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are and when I see the blood I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt.

This is a day you are to commemorate. For the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord, a lasting ordinance. For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast.

On the first day remove the yeast from your houses for whoever eats anything with yeast in it from the first day until the seventh must be cut off from Israel. On the first day hold a sacred assembly and another one on the seventh day. Do not work at all on these days except to prepare food for each other.

That is all you may do. Celebrate the feast of unleavened bread because it is on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come.

I've been coming to the church for nearly two years now but before I came to the church I went to a Mr Brown's Boys Club but I only went because we had a good time. We played football and bundled in the helpers. On Sundays it did not really mean anything to me.

Then when I was 13 I moved up to the Older's Boys Club but it still didn't mean anything to me then. But nearer the end before the club broke up I started to realize that the helpers had something I didn't have. Then I found out that they were Christians.

It was one Sunday evening around John McArra's that Ian Taylor had told us how to become a Christian. It stayed in my mind the whole week. Then the following Sunday the pastor said the same thing.

That evening I asked the Lord into my life. I've been a Christian for 18 months now. I really got to know the Lord even more with Track 2. It is not easy being a Christian.

It's quite hard but we know. In Proverbs 3 verse 6 it says In all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy path and I believe he will guide me. Behold he stands at the door and knocks And only you can open the door He waits for you to let him in He's waited many times before Many times you've said tomorrow Tomorrow Lord come back again Add more time some other day Lord Perhaps I'll think about it then Oh but still tomorrow never comes And life is passing day by day Tomorrow might not come at all Behold he stands and knocks today Lessons of time and space From heaven's throne to Calvary His saving hand reached down for you To bring you peace and make you free The voices try to tell you That God is dead and lives no more He lives, he knows you and he loves you He's waiting just outside your door Oh don't wait until tomorrow comes And life is passing day by day Tomorrow might not come at all Behold he stands and knocks today Behold he stands and knocks today Oh hear him as he knocks today Now I purposely come up here this evening not because I like heights But just so that more of you can see the visual aid which I have To illustrate what's on my heart tonight Now I was saying to the elders just a little while ago That one of my own concerns about using a visual aid is that Adults may think well this therefore applies just to the youngsters, to the young people and not to me But nowhere could you be more wrong This applies to you as well as to younger people And I want as best I can to explain to you the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ Before I came to Worthing, I was a school teacher I used to preach sometimes in London and help out at a church But I was a schoolmaster in North London And some of my boys and girls of about 13, 14, 15 years of age Had come to this country and they didn't really understand English They'd come from Pakistan, they'd come from Turkey, some had come from Cyprus And the first thing that had to be taught them was of course the alphabet and how to construct words And a long time ago, in the experience of everybody here, varying in degrees of length of time You too had to learn the alphabet Remember when you were two or three and mum, dad bought you some building blocks And you tried to work out just which one went on top of the other Was it really a question of like that or was it a question of like that And then one day mum discovered that she had a genius in Worthing Who had worked out at a very tender age That A came before B and that B came before C The simplicity of the English alphabet began to dawn A, B, C, D, E, F and so you progressed until you really were a budding Einstein When you got down to X, Y, Z I come from the North of England and my football team is Sheffield United Now sometimes they have played the Albion And let's imagine one occasion, let's just reflect on when it might have happened When United were down there at Hove, 90 minutes had gone The score was in the favour of Sheffield of course, 5-0 And all the sophisticated Yorkshire people were saying Easy, easy, you've heard the chant haven't you Impossible for anyone to stop us, now it's easy And because they're humble folk in the North of England As they were travelling back to England's green and pleasant land They would say the railway compartment, well that game was just a piece of cake A piece of cake It was as simple as A, B, C As simple as A, B, C Sometimes I'm asked about the Christian faith By people who've got the completely wrong understanding of what it's all about I remember being in some of our universities quite recently And trying to disarm students there of peculiar notions As to who can be and what constitutes a Christian So I thought that tonight at least we could ensure that the record's straight in Worthing Because I want to talk to you about the A, B, C of salvation And I guess really if you were to interpret what Jesus had to say When he was asked about becoming a Christian You could reduce it to one word Simplicity On one occasion somebody came to the Lord Jesus He was talking to a group of adults And he said for a person to be a follower of mine He or she has to become as a little child A little child doesn't have great problems in believing in mum and dad A little child accepts that parents are for the benefit of them and they trust them And Jesus says that a person to be a Christian has got to trust me Indeed he said to one great philosopher in his day who came along to see him Unless a person became almost as though they re-entered the womb and were born again They can't enter into the kingdom of heaven The key you see is simplicity, that turns it So that means to say that boys and girls, young people, older folks are all level As far as becoming Christians are concerned You don't have to have an IQ of 120 You don't have to have been in the world for a long, long time You don't necessarily have to have had your mother and father who are Christians But by accepting the Lord Jesus yourself And his death on the cross A simple act which I shall describe to you in a moment or so You can become a Christian But let's go back to those building blocks just for a moment or two longer And let me put the first step, the first of the simple steps up here on the board So that you can understand how to become a Christian The first thing is accept You've got to accept a couple of things about yourself and indeed about everybody else in this world Long time ago God set down some particular instructions that he wanted people to live by We haven't got the opportunity this evening of going through them all But they're in the Old Testament And sometimes they are referred to as the Ten Commandments They've just been drawn here in one tablet They were originally on two tablets of stones, two stone blocks And those ten instructions were there And God was saying to you and to me today as he said to people yesterday year If you really want to please me then keep my law You know what happens sometimes when you hear of people putting the boot in Destruction occurs And people get hurt Well men and women have put the boot in, they've broken God's law They've fallen short of what God wanted them to be, boys and girls as well as adults And if you're going to be a Christian the first thing you've got to do is to accept that You've broken God's law There must be a feeling of sorrow, conviction Do you know what conviction is? I heard a delightful story this afternoon Of a cat who was constantly doing wrong Another feeling And as far as cats are concerned This particular one was constantly going next door where there was a goldfish pond And he knew he shouldn't have been there And he was waiting very cautiously for a fish to come along So that he could dab at one with his claws And the neighbour who owned the pond was absolutely fed up with his cat And saw him stealthily watching the fish So he equally stealthily crept behind the cat And the cat didn't know he was there And he suddenly said, Boo! And the cat jumped straight into the fish pond An animal aware that he was doing something that wasn't permissible And to become a Christian You first of all got to recognise that you have broken God's law We were told a story this morning from Bruce Welland About a young lad who had an accident and got all tarred up And the Bible says that not only have we broken God's law But there's a stain within our hearts In fact the stain is well referred to in scripture When we find in Isaiah 1 verse 18 these words Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow Do you know in scripture we are often told That sin is not figuratively described as black but rather as red Do you know the reason for that? Because in the old days it was very, very difficult to get scarlet dye When it had been applied out of a garment The Bible says our hearts are stained I remember as a student, being about 18 at the time, maybe 19 In London doing my first wash And I went to a particular laundrette I'd never been in these places before Because I'd been coddled by my mother as a youngster She did everything in this sort of area And I can remember that place now Three o'clock or thereabouts in the afternoon It was infested with ladies And they were all experts in where you put the washing And apply the coins and so on and so forth And I tried to look as though I knew what I was doing And I hadn't really got a clue And I bunged my stuff in the hole where I thought it should go And I put the relevant amount of money in And I sat down with a smug smile on my face I'd done it, I'd made the grade I too was a qualified washer Half an hour later I discovered the fact that sometimes socks run As far as colour is concerned And my red socks didn't just run, they galloped My shirts, my vest, everything was absolutely crimson And I furtively got the contents from this washer And I put them into my plastic bag Hoping that none of these expert ladies would see I dashed out of the place to my little room And I thought, goodness, what do I do now? And then, as though it was a bolt from the blue The word Domestos came into my mind This is perfectly true And I went out and I bought a bottle And there was one bucket in my room Besides one or two essential pieces of furniture And I applied this Domestos to some water Quite liberally And I pushed all my crimson coloured garments and sheets In the bucket, one by one Do you know that place absolutely reeked of Domestos for a long time? It did the trick What it did to the sheets as well, I'm not too sure Because they wore out pretty quickly afterwards But it did get rid of the stain And you've got to accept, my young friend And my older friend too, for I'm not joking Although I use illustrations that are humorous to make the point real That in your heart there's a stain And that stain must have something appropriate as a remover I was working with some others on the extension on Friday This bakery that we bought And I got so much paint on my hands I don't know how Mr Land manages He paints so well and you can't even see that there's a little bit on him But with me it's almost like another baptism And I went home to get myself clean It doesn't matter if you put water on your hands when you've got paint there It doesn't shift it You can even get soap and it's still very stubborn and resistant And it doesn't move much I had to go and get some white spirit And that got rid of it The remover had to be appropriate to the stain It had to go deep so that there was nothing left on my skin Do you know young fellows who sometimes don't like water and soap too much When they are persuaded to have just a little bit of a relationship They often leave a little tide mark, don't they And you can see just where it's been done Or maybe they're not very good about cleaning the bath when they've used it And you can see that Junior has been in the bath by the mark around the edge But the remover that I need to cleanse me from my sin Is not to leave a mark at all It's to cleanse me thoroughly And that's what the Bible says the Lord Jesus Christ can do Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow The New Testament goes on to give us another part of that statement When it says the blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanses us from all sin So I must accept, number one, that I've broken God's law And number two, that I've got a stained personality Having accepted that, I must put my belief in something That will remedy my need I heard a story this last week or so Actually I think Albert Stoner told me on the way back from Winchester College of Education Amazing what elders talk to me about as we're driving around the country A man going through a jungle And he's in great problems He's suddenly confronted by a ferocious lion Doesn't know what to do Never prayed before, but he thinks, well, he may as well try that Because the thing's about to pounce So he got down on his knees and prayed And then he looked up And he saw the lion doing exactly the same thing And he said, thank goodness The lion opened one eye and he said, don't speak too soon, I'm only saying grace You see, the man got his belief somewhat skew Because what he was putting his trust in His ability in prayer On this occasion, just was not right He hadn't got through and got an answer to his particular problem But in the story, the true story that Celia read to us a little while ago We read of people who really were in desperate situations And it was no joke, the Hebrews They were in Egypt, they'd been in a state of sin Or rather in a state of slavery for quite some time And the Lord God sent Moses to help them And on one occasion, Moses said, look, this night God will deliver you Because there's going to be a plague that will pass all across the Egyptian homes This plague of death controlled by one of my angels It will affect all the Egyptian families, but not yours And the Israelites said, well, how will this particular angel know to pass over our household? Moses said, I want you to get some hyssop, which was a weed And I want you to kill a lamb Don't waste the blood of the lamb, let the blood be caught in a basin And then with the blood in the basin, I want you to go to your house And I want you to paint the lintel and also the doorposts of the house And when this plague passes over the land of Egypt You will escape The effects of it won't come to your particular family When I see the blood, I will pass over you And the Israelites believed They accepted that the nation would be physically delivered from Egypt by doing just what Moses had said And the New Testament tells us this That the Lord Jesus Christ, God's Son Died on the cross of Calvary So that what? So that His blood and the effects of His righteous life Might accrue as benefits To all people who would say, Lord Jesus, I believe in You I believe that You died on the cross of Calvary to save me I'm putting my trust in what You have done on my behalf Accept that you've broken God's law That your heart is stained with sin Believe that the Lord Jesus Christ has died on the cross of Calvary to save you And then there's something else before the act of salvation is complete The third step, coming back to the simplicities of the faith The ABC, confess Confess what? Well, the Bible says this If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord And believe in your heart That God has raised Him from the dead You will be saved I wanted President Carter to come here this evening to give his testimony But he's otherwise engaged, however he sent a little memento And that indicates to us That a person who's really a Christian Is somebody who talks about it And if you girls are talking about Christianity at the moment Just be a little quieter, will you? It's not only a question though of what you say has happened It's not just a question of reading the Bible alone It's rather a question of putting into practice those things which you have heard You remember your experiments perhaps that you've done in science at school The teacher has told you a certain thing You put acid on certain elements, you get an exothermic reaction Heat is engendered and maybe you're trying it all out You've put into practice what you have heard And that's what Christianity is about Not just a question of reading the Bible Not just a question of coming to the tabernacle and listening to someone explain Why Jesus died on the cross of Calvary That's all necessary, but it goes beyond that And mothers and fathers, it's true for you too There must be an experimental approach Putting your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ Saying, yes Lord, I believe that you died on the cross of Calvary to save me I suggested in my hypothetical football match That the Sheffield fans were saying, it's easy It's a piece of cake In one sense, my friend Christianity and becoming a child of God Is an easy thing Not because it costs nothing, it costs a great deal indeed But simply to say to the Lord Jesus Christ Look, I believe that I have made a mess of my life And I believe that you have come into this world to undo that mess That's a simple response You see men and women, we're not asking, the Lord God is not asking That you start at Genesis and go right through to Revelation And understand everything that's there before you can become a Christian It's not a question of going to college or to seminary Christianity and entry into it Is as simple as A, B, C Accept that you've broken the law of God Accept that there's a stain in your hearts You older people, you know there's a stain there You know there's a stain in our world You can't read your newspaper You can't tune into your television or to your radio Without realising that something is desperately wrong with society One occasion, there was some correspondence in the Times As to just what was wrong with Great Britain And G.K. Chesterton wrote one of the best and shortest answers He said to the editor, dear sir, I am There's a tragedy within the heart of man that's wrong Can't you accept that? Realise that there's something amiss And having accepted that, B, you've got to believe Believe that there's an antidote Believe that if you liken the illustration I used There's a cleanser, something that can take away the sin within your life The blood of Jesus, God's Son, that cleanses you from all sin And rely upon Him Put your confidence in Him And be a better parent, a better father, a better son A better mother, a better daughter, a better wife as a result And then confess Tell others not just what you know in your mind But what you've experienced in your heart It's easy, it's A-B-C To be a Christian But alas, the simple things in life so often Are the things that we bypass And attend to more complex issues I beg you in the name of the Lord Jesus this night Don't pass over this simple demonstration of the truths of Christianity But respond to it by commitment of your own heart and life Let us pray Father, we come before you Praising you for your goodness Thanking you that you worked it out that for a person to enter your kingdom He or she had to become as a little child Thank you for the A-B-C of the faith Now help us, Father God, to put into practice what we have heard graphically Portrayed from your word this evening And whether we're adults Or boys and girls May we respond As Pedro and so many others have In these recent days For Jesus' sake Amen