A Consequence of Legitimacy by Kevin Rhodes

Written by Drew on June 30th, 2008

It is no secret that a study of the book of Revelation introduces all sorts of perplexities. The work is couched in apocalyptic language decipherable only after long hours of careful consideration of the symbols John used. And then there is the historical background of the book. When was it written and what were the circumstances of the persecution that affected the seven churches of Asia? A consultation of the commentaries only leads to frustration. One will maintain that the book is set in Nero’s time before the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Another will claim with just as much boldness that the visions John saw occurred later, during the reign of Domitian (A.D. 69-96).

The truth is that there is no simple answer to the question of Christian persecution in the first century Roman Empire. Internally, the book offers nothing more than inconclusive clues. Externally, the evidence is almost as cloudy. Much has been made about the negative appraisals of Domitian’s character given by Roman historians who lived near his time, but to accept their claims without examining them critically is to ignore the fact that many of the works of that era were tainted by political motives.

In A Consequence of Legitimacy, Kevin Rhodes has done the heavy lifting that is needed for a definitive answer to this problem. He states that “the evidence is conclusive that a persecution of Christians in Asia did indeed occur during the reign of Domitian” (156). However, he doesn’t base his entire case on the testimony of one prejudicial witness. For example, he concedes that the evidence does not support the early church historian Eusebius in his claim that Domitian was the second emperor who promoted a Christian persecution (153). Rhodes’s approach is panoramic, taking into account the intricate political tapestry of first century Rome. This approach includes Domitian’s struggle with the senate, along with efforts in provinces like Asia to show loyalty to the emperor through the imperial cult. These considerations lead Rhodes to the conclusion that the persecution of the Christians in the Asian province was not directly instigated by Domitian, but the policies he developed created an environment that allowed the enemies of Christianity to attempt to destroy it.

A Consequence of Legitimacy is a technical work that draws from primary historical sources. Therefore a background in Roman history is helpful to the reader. Otherwise he will want to have a good encyclopedia handy to fill in the gaps of his understanding of World History.

Rhodes has produced a helpful volume. Because of his contribution, we have a firm historical foundation on which we can base our study of the final book in the New Testament.

 

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Darwin’s Polar Bears

Written by Drew on May 30th, 2008

I can’t get my mind off polar bears this morning. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced in May that he would list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. His reasoning is that 1) the polar bears depend on sea ice; 2) the sea ice at the polar caps has been melting significantly for the last several decades; and 3) computer models project that this trend will continue in the future. This decision is yet another victory for those who advance the sketchy science of global warming, although many are saying Kempthorne’s move did not go far enough.

The listing of polar bears as a threatened species sets a precedent, as the decision was not based on concrete evidence that the bears are, in fact, threatened. According to Kempthorne, the population of bears has grown from a low of about 12,000 in the late 1960s to approximately 25,000 today. For the first time, we are using speculative data from questionable computer models to foresee the future of Mother Earth.

It is comical to me that the same scientists responsible for this decision are the ones who champion Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Darwin would have never made a fuss over a struggling species. In fact, because 0f his convictions on natural selection, he even frowned on efforts to help the weaker members of the human race. In The Descent of Man he wrote,

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skills to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed (emphasis added).

If Darwin were in charge, there wouldn’t be any polar bears. Let ‘em drown. Survival of the fittest.

Sooner or later, our scientists are going to have to decide whether human beings are the crowning jewels of evolution, the fittest creatures at the top of the heap of natural selection, or the benevolent saviors of Planet Earth trying to preserve the globe in its present form.

As a Christian, I believe humans have a responsibility to be good stewards of the natural world God has blessed us with. That has been our charge from the first (Gen. 1:28-31). But environmentalism goes beyond this, positioning our nation in a set of inconsistencies that will amount to economic disaster and wasted resources.

 

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The Moon: We Can’t Reach It

Written by Drew on May 12th, 2008

It’s Monday, and I’m doing what I do every Monday, fretting over what to preach next Sunday. Sunday night is my favorite night of the week. It’s the one time that I’m not stressing over my next sermon. By Monday morning it’s back to the preacher’s age-old problem of what to preach. I’ve heard it called the “tyranny of Sundays,” which is how sermon preparation can feel sometimes when you’re fresh out of ideas.

People who have never prepared sermons on a weekly basis will probably be surprised to hear that preachers deal with writer’s block. I mean, there are sixty-six books of inspiration to choose from and a world of problems out there. The possibility of subjects is limitless. Picking sermon topics looks easy until you try it. It’s like dieting: You are excited about it until the first meal and then you’re pretty hungry by 10:00 a.m. and you tell yourself to hold on to your resolve but by the evening news you’ve eaten an entire bag of potato chips.

In Homiletics, they will tell you to plan a year’s worth of preaching ahead of time. This is something I want to try sometime, when I am able to set aside a week or two to do the necessary planning. The art of planning months of sermons ahead of time involves being creative with series. There’s no way to plan 104 individual sermons all at once, so you have to come up with themes that will dictate several good, relevant sermons. When I do this, I will probably include a series based on a book, say, Mark’s Gospel for example. I want to try to stay away from the cliche sermon series like the “I am” statements of Jesus or a study of the beatitudes. These are great studies, but if I’m going to do series, I want them to be smart, creative, and, most of all, important.

Here is where sermon selection gets sticky. How do you frame God’s Word in such a way that it speaks to our generation? Everything pertaining to life and godliness is already there, but people are not going to read the Bible on their own and apply it to life the way they should. If they were doing this, we preachers would be out of a job. Our task is to break the Word of Life into just the right portions, season it with relevance, and serve it in an environment conducive to digestion–not too much sweet stuff, but not just beets and cabbage, either.

My suggestion for learning the art of sermon selection is to watch children. Kids are masters of profundity. It doesn’t matter that they know nothing about their world and need to be taught by others. When they speak people listen.

Take, for example, a declarative statement made by my two-year-old daughter: “The moon! I can’t reach it.” What did we learn from that? Of course we can’t reach the moon. It’s 238,857 miles from earth. But when she said those words, we listened like Plato at the feet of Socrates. We wrote the saying down in a journal so we wouldn’t forget it. Called the grandparents and let them know. “The moon! It’s true! We really can’t reach it.” The secret behind my daughter’s expert delivery is basically that (1) she was sincerely fascinated with her subject; (2) she spoke the truth; and (3) she framed truth in language that had never occurred to us before.

I don’t see why we preachers can’t say something on a weekly basis that will make more of an impact than my daughter’s observations on astronomy. We have the advantage of the riches of God’s Word. With that as our resource, and with enthusiasm over our subject, loyalty to the Word, and creative analysis, illustration, and application, we should be able to captivate our hearers. That is, if my conclusions about my daughter’s rhetorical skills were right. If it all boils down to cuteness, however, she has us at a disadvantage.
 

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Tradition

Written by Drew on May 5th, 2008

No audience is more intimidating for a speaker than a general assembly of adolescents at school on a Monday morning. It is a well-known fact that teenagers eat guest speakers for breakfast, especially the cheerful ones who walk in with a Bible wanting to give them spiritual advice. Paul’s Areopagites could not have been more daunting than chapel with highschoolers.  Whenever I visit our local Christian school to take my turn at chapel, my audience appears to be dealing with insufferable pain—maybe it’s iPod withdrawals or it could be a Facebook hangover.  It’s hard to tell.

On my last excursion to the amphitheater of doom, I gained the upper hand.  Chapel always begins with the Pledge of Allegiance followed by a prayer, but on this particular day someone had removed the flag.  This had not been discovered until the student assigned to conduct the Pledge asked the entire student body to turn and face the flag and everybody placed their right hands over their hearts and set their gaze on an empty corner of the auditorium.  It was a student’s turn to blush at chapel.  Our leader didn’t know what to do.  He blushed, shrugged his shoulders, and began, “I pledge allegiance, to the flag….”  We all followed suit.  It didn’t matter that we were pledging allegiance to a flag that wasn’t there because we always say the Pledge at chapel.

Humans are creatures of habit.  We’re locked into our traditions and sometimes we don’t even know why it is that we do the things that we do.

Like schools, churches like their traditions. Tradition provides worshipers with familiarity, with met expectations. People don’t like to worship in an atmosphere where they don’t know what’s coming next.

Most churches of Christ have a custom of offering the Lord’s Supper a second time during the evening services to accommodate those who were not able to make it to the morning services.  It’s still the first day of the week, and there are always a handful of people who take advantage of this arrangement.  Nowadays, many churches do this in a classroom after the closing song, away from the others who have already observed the Lord’s Supper.  But some churches still do this the old fashioned way: asking those who want to take the Lord’s Supper in the evening to come to the front of the auditorium during the singing of a hymn, and serving a handful of congregants before the watchful eyes of the rest who were there Sunday morning and who are not sure whether they should be dwelling on the cross or thinking about the grocery list.

I was serving as a youth minister at a congregation that followed this procedure when two souls responded to the invitation during our evening services, expressing a desire to be baptized.  We baptized them, and not wanting them to miss the opportunity, waited for them to get changed before we offered the Lord’s Supper that night. After a bit of a delay, we were serving these new Christians when another person approached me and said he wanted to be baptized.  As we were preparing him for the baptism, the question came up of how we would serve him the Lord’s Supper.  I suggested that since we had already offered it twice that day, we should dismiss the crowd after the baptism and serve him privately.  But an elder who was present had strong misgivings about changing our routine.  Long story short, we served the Lord’s Supper for the third time that Sunday to one person in front of a crowd of about 350 people.

Traditions can be good.  Paul commended Timothy for maintaining the apostolic traditions that had been delivered to him (1 Cor. 11:2). But an apostolic tradition is one thing.  A human tradition is an entirely different matter. Apostolic traditions are inspired (cf. Jn. 14:26; 16:13), human traditions are not. Much damage has been done by church leaders who move human traditions from the column of discretion to the column of faith.  This was the Pharisees’ sin.  Jesus called them hypocrites and said they made the word of God “void” for the sake of their tradition.  Quoting Isaiah, he admonished them, saying, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Mt. 15:6-9).

I’m not saying it’s wrong to offer the Lord’s Supper three times on Sunday.  I do think that sometimes we make our decisions based on the learned behavior of our tradition rather than on what God’s word reveals.  God seeks true worshipers (Jn. 4:23-24), not Pavlov’s dog.  Sincere hearts engaged in the process and convinced of God’s will trump traditions every time.

 

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When Good Deeds End in Tragedy

Written by Drew on April 22nd, 2008

I received a strange call today from the sister of a young drifter I had become acquainted with a few weeks ago.  She had called to tell me that he had died.  It seems that he had hitched a ride with a guy who was bad news. This guy, along with his girlfriend and my friend, were headed for town when the police spotted them and gave chase.  Evidently, there was a warrant out for the driver’s arrest.  The chase ended badly when the car flew off an embankment and landed upside-down in a pond.  All three passengers must have been killed on impact.  There was no sign that any of them had tried to escape.

I got to know this young man through my work as a minister.  He had come by my office one day begging for food.  He had hitch-hiked down to Birmingham thinking he could find work, but when he arrived he discovered that jobs were scarce.  He’d been sleeping on a couple of plastic crates in the woods and collecting cans during the day to buy food.  Our church helped him with a few things–we bought him a few meals and helped him get into a trailer for $10 a night.  One of our deacons even found him a job.  He seemed interested in our church, and I was hoping he would study the Bible with me and obey the gospel.  He came to church one Sunday night and promised to return the following Wednesday.
He often said, “I’ve got my whole life in front of me.”  He was only nineteen.  Little did he know, that young life of his would end suddenly because of a bad decision.  He was killed before we had a chance to help him.
Any preacher can tell stories like this one.  We’re in a position where people feel like they can come and ask for help.  Most of them are freeloaders just looking for a handout.  You can get pretty calloused dealing with their kind several times a week.  But some people really do need help.  As hard as it might be to minister to them, the church must continue to try. 
I get pretty frustrated when I’m doing benevolent work.  At the same time, it puts me in contact with a cross-section of my community that I would never encounter otherwise.  That’s important.  Every person has a soul–even the ones who have made a mess out of their lives.
I’m not sure what I’m trying to say with this post.  This is just one story in a chain of unhappy endings.  Maybe it’s my way of bringing attention to one of the most difficult Christian responsibilities.  When our best efforts end in tragedy, we must put our trust in God and keep trying, knowing that this work is not for our glory, but God’s: “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Mt. 5:16).
 

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A Conversation about Divorce

Written by Drew on April 11th, 2008

Now that about half of all marriages end in divorce, Christians are faced with tough questions as they try to reconcile Christ’s teachings with a culture that is less than serious about its marriage vows.

Few passages in the New Testament address divorce and remarriage, but those that do are quite clear regarding God’s will in the matter. One of the passages that stirs up more questions on divorce than perhaps any other is 1 Corinthians 7:10-16, with special emphasis on the so-called “Pauline privilege” in verse 15. Some contend that Paul permits remarriage under any circumstance, saying that divorcees are not “enslaved” or “under bondage.” But a careful reading of the statement in context will show that this interpretation does not suit the passage at large.

Paul uses a familiar literary device in 1 Corinthians 7 that can be found throughout his letters whereby he anticipates questions or concerns on the part of his readers and addresses them as if they were asked while he was writing the letter. In essence, he is having a conversation with an imaginary student. If we read his thoughts on divorce and remarriage in 1 Corinthians 7:10-16 with this perspective, we will understand God’s will on the matter.

The conversation goes something like this:

Student: “Paul, I know that you are single, and I have even heard you say on occasion that its easier for a person to devote his life to God when he does not have a family. Should I leave my husband?”

Paul: “To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband…and the husband should not divorce his wife” (1 Cor. 7:10-11).

Student: “But what if she does? Can she marry another?”

Paul: “If she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband” (1 Cor. 7:11).

Student: “My husband is not a Christian. I want to give my life to the Lord, but I feel that he is a bad influence on me. Should I leave him and remain single?”

Paul: “To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him” (1 Cor. 7:12-13).

Student: “But my husband is already talking about leaving me. We have so many differences that I fear it will impossible for us to work them out. Will God judge me if my marriage falls apart? Will I be placed in a state of perpetual sin through no fault of my own?”

Paul: “If the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace” (1 Cor. 7:15).

Clearly, Paul is not discussing grounds for divorce and subsequent remarriage. He is responding to an entirely different issue–that of a Christian who has been abandoned by her spouse. A “Pauline privilege” would put Paul in conflict with what the Lord has already said on the matter. Remarriage following a divorce is allowed only when the divorce took place on the grounds of sexual immorality (i.e., unlawful sexual intercourse) (Mt. 5:31-32; 19:9).

An interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7:15 which allows remarriage under any circumstances will not work in the context. If that is the interpretation, this is what we make Paul to say in 1 Corinthians 7:10-15.

Married couples should not divorce, but if they do, they should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to one another.

If marriage does not work out, and a couple gets a divorce, the former partners are no longer bound to each other. They are free to remarry, no matter what.

Was Paul saying nonsense? Only if we try to project unlimited remarriage privileges on his statements. A better approach is to acknowledge the concerns of Paul’s original audience and interpret his words accordingly.

 

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Punishment

Written by Drew on April 7th, 2008

In my Ethics class, I teach my students that punishment involves the following five elements.

  1. Punishment must involve pain, harm, or some other consequence normally considered unpleasant.
  2. The punishment must be administered for an offense against a law or rule.

  3. The punishment must be administered to someone who has been judged guilty of an offense.

  4. The punishment must be imposed by someone other than the offender.

  5. The punishment must be imposed by rightful authority (Olen and Barry, Applying Ethics, 320-231).

During a Q&A session in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Barack Obama responded to a woman’s plea to “stop these abortions.” After giving the typical Democratic response that we have to trust women to make the right decisions for themselves, he elaborated on his belief that sex education ought to be taught in public schools.

Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at age 16, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.

What did he mean by “punished with a baby”? Perhaps it was a poor choice of words, but as far as I know, he hasn’t retracted his words. It appears that Senator Obama really does think of some pregnancies as punishment, which means he believes a baby is “harm” inflicted on a guilty person by a rightful authority.
Is he saying babies bring “harm” to their mothers? Does he mean that irresponsible, premarital sex is morally wrong? Does he defer to God, the rightful authority who “inflicts” women with pregnancies? All these conclusions are based on the textbook meaning of the word “punishment” in the context of his statements in Pennsylvania.
Perhaps this is yet another election-year gaffe. But one ought to be more careful when he is addressing a subject as sensitive as abortion. Words mean things, and I believe Senator Obama’s words reveal a moral deficiency, not only in his own thinking but also in one of the major platforms of the Democratic party. For those who promote abortion as a woman’s right, pregnancy is punishment; babies are painful consequences of bad behavior.
I prefer David’s outlook–they are gifts from God (Ps. 127:3-5). No Democrat or Republican is going to change my mind on that.
 

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Wednesday Night Lecture Series

Written by Drew on April 1st, 2008

Tomorrow night begins our annual Spring Series on Wednesday nights. This year, our theme is “Unusual Stories from the Old Testament.” Below are the individual topics, listed in the order they will be presented.

  • “Ravens, Rations, and a Resurrection” (1 Kgs. 17)
  • “Jonah and the Great Fish” (Jonah 1-4)
  • “The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar” (Dan. 4)
  • “The Man Who Married a Prostitute” (Hosea 1-3)
  • “Ezekiel’s Eccentricities” (Ezk. 4:4-8)
  • “Acetylene Adders and a Serpentine Sign” (Num. 21:4-9)
  • “The Tale of the Talking Donkey” (Num. 22)
  • “Famous Last Words” (2 Kgs. 2:23-25)
  • “Remember Lot’s Wife” (Gen. 19:1-29)
  • “Raiders of the Lord’s Ark” (1 Sam. 5-6)
  • “Saul’s Seance” (1 Samuel 28:1-25)

I thought I would post these for preachers who are looking for ideas. More and more congregations are doing these lecture series, and if they are anything like me, the directors are always looking for fresh ideas. If your congregations doesn’t host a Wednesday night lecture series, these topics will also work for a sermon series.

Any other ideas for a series? You can just give the theme, or list the individual topics too. I’ve got to plan one again next year.

 

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A Capella Singing Downloads

Written by Drew on March 25th, 2008

Last weekend, I gave a eulogy for one of our members who had been sick for a long time. Her family put me in charge of the entire service. They even asked me to take care of the music. Organizing the music for a funeral is not an unusual request; I get asked to do that all the time. Usually, I assemble a small group of singers for the job, but on this particular weekend several of our members were out of town. I decided to use recorded music.

While surfing the Net, I stumbled upon the Web site for the Kleinwood church of Christ in Spring, Texas. They have a large archive of songs their congregation has recorded through the years. It is some of the best a capella singing I have ever heard, and all of it is free to download.

I scrolled through the list of songs, downloaded some hymns that were appropriate for a memorial service, burned a CD, and walked away with some great music for the funeral.

 

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Some Statistics

Written by Drew on March 24th, 2008

Tomorrow morning I am speaking at chapel for Jefferson Christian Academy in Birmingham, Alabama. The manuscript for my speech is below.

I have decided to use my time in chapel this morning to share some important statistics with you. I know that statistics can be very dry and that you didn’t come here to learn about numbers, but I think that you will find this information to be useful.

God must love numbers or else he wouldn’t have named a book of the Bible after them. The Bible records several numerical records for us. There are large numbers: Three thousand were baptized in Acts 2; Jesus fed 5,000, not including women and children; he appeared to over 500 witnesses following his resurrection. But the numbers don’t have to be large to catch God’s attention. We can also find a parable about a shepherd who left ninety-nine to look for one lost sheep.

Getting to my point, here are the statistics I want to share with you this morning. According to Thom Ranier in his book, Closing the Back Door, in America, eighty-two percent of the people who become Christians do so before the age of twenty. Just looking at the raw data, if we don’t reach people with the gospel before they turn twenty, we will miss eighty-two percent of them. Even more striking is his finding that seventy-five percent of Americans who become Christians do so between the ages of nine and fourteen.

What happens after graduation? The Barna Group reports that between sixty-nine and ninety-four percent of Christian youths will abandon their faith after they complete high school. These numbers vary, depending on the religious body.

Putting these figures together, we see that high school is a crucial time in our lives. For most of us, if we do not get grounded in the faith during these years, we will not follow God in adulthood. Perhaps this is what Solomon meant when he said, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6).

These numbers establish the importance of youth programs in church and the need for parents to exert a godly influence on their children. They show the need for schools like Jefferson Christian Academy. But what do they say to young people? Here are some observations directed towards those who are directly affected by these statistics.

1. When it comes to salvation, there’s no time like the present. Teenagers have reached the age of accountability. Their guilt is fresh; they are ripe for conversion. In these years sin is easier to correct—young hearts are more malleable than old ones.

Besides this, the Bible teaches that procrastinating your obedience to the gospel is foolish. David advised us to call out to God “at a time when he may be found” (Ps. 32:6). Paul said, “Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2).

2. The toughest temptations are ahead. This is the only explanation for why most people become Christians before they are twenty and why most Christians fall away after high school. Conventional wisdom teaches that temptation peaks in high school, and it is true that teenagers are faced with a lot of challenges, but the numbers say the devil’s most powerful strike occurs after graduation.

Knowing this, you ought to be grounding yourself in the faith now, so that you will be ready when things get really tough.

Follow the example of Jesus. He had a sense of when he would face his greatest temptations, and he was ready for them when they came. At twelve he was in the temple, studying with the scribes. At thirty he was baptized by John in the Jordan River, even though he had never sinned. He explained to John that he needed to be baptized to fulfill all righteousness (Mt. 3:15). Soon afterwards he met the devil in the wilderness and faced three trying temptations. Because he was ready, he resisted every one.

3. Envision who you want to be in thirty years. If you want to be a Christian, the time to start down that path is now. Do you want to be a bitter unbeliever who has no hope in the next world? If so, there is nothing more for you to do to prepare to fulfill your dream. But if you hope to be a faithful Christian one day, you should take the first step now, while you are young. According to the statistics, if you don’t obey the gospel now, you probably won’t do it when you are older.

This is the advice given by King Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes: “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’” (12:1). The ancient Hebrew term translated remember means “to act decisively on behalf of someone.” Solomon is saying, “Act decisively on behalf of God while you are young.” If you invest in evil now, you will pay heavy dividends in “evil days” later, as you deal with the consequences of your sin, the emotional scars, and the bad habits.

4. If you are already a Christian, you need to know that, being a young person, you will never be among a more responsive peer group. Evangelism is the duty of every Christian, not just the older members of the church (Mt. 28:19-20). The figures we have been talking about say that, as a young person, you have a special connection to the most responsive group of prospects in America. Are you using your position to an advantage?

Plato said, “A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.” This is true. You should never do anything just because that’s what the majority is doing. I would never want you to become a Christian now, just because this is the time when most people become a Christian. The reason I would want you to become a Christian is because every person who has reached the age of accountability is lost in sin. Jesus died to save the lost, and God has revealed how we can be saved by him in the New Testament. This is why I want people to become Christians. If there is anyone in this audience who has not been washed in the blood of Jesus, it is my prayer that he will obey the gospel now before it is too late.

 

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