America is not gospel hardened. America is ignorant to the true gospel of Jesus Christ. We have taken the gospel and reduced it to the four spiritual laws or 5 things you should know. The question is not “Do you want to go to heaven?” The devil wants to go to heaven. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but they just don’t want to be there when they get there. The question is: “Since you have heard gospel preaching, has God done such a supernatural work of conversion in your heart through the Holy Spirit that now you hate the sin you once loved? That the god you hated and ignored you now esteem, love and seek?” It’s not “Do you want to pray a prayer/open up your heart and receive me?” John came to Israel preaching repentence. The first words out of Jesus’ mouth were “Repent!” Peter on the day of Pentecost says “Repent”. In America, we think we can manipulate a move of God, coercing people to be saved. Man is a spiritually dead, God-hating enemy of God. In order for that spiritually dead man to respond to the gospel call, it’s going to take a lot more than human manipulation. It’s going to take the supernatural, regenerating, recreating work of the Holy Spirit.
We live in a day where we think that in order to be relevant to our culture, we must be like our culture. We live in a day where we think that in order for the gospel to be relevant, we must somehow adapt it to the culture and nothing on the face of the earth or in the bowels of hell could be further from the truth. We are relevant not because we are like our culture, we are relevant because we are absolutely different. Our gospel has power, not because it is acceptable to carnal men, our gospel has power because is it a SCANDAL to men. Paul is not ashamed of the gospel, but his flesh had every reason to be. Imagine for a moment: we are not talking about a man who comes into the context of the bible belt. We are talking about a man that comes into the context of Jewish mythology, to Greek philosophy. Every concept the Jews had about the Messiah, contradicted the gospel of Jesus Christ. Every time the apostle Paul stood up, he seemed to carnal men to be nothing more than a raving madman. And every preacher that's ever been worth his salt, since that day, has had the same label put upon him. G. Campbell Morgan, when he would go up to the tower at Westminster to preach, he always said that he would quote the verse "Like a lamb led to the slaughter, and like a sheep before his sheerers". Why? He knew that unless God moved on his behalf with this gospel of God's dear son, absolutely nothing would happen. But we don't see power like that today. Why? Because we prop up a gospel with the carnal devices of men. We remove the scandal in the name of love, as though we had greater wisdom than God, to tweak His gospel here and there so it might be more palatable to men. The gospel of Jesus Christ; the flesh has every reason to be ashamed of it, but in that lies the power. Everything about about God's messiah contradicted everything that men beleived about the Messiah. Everything about God's salvation contradicts absolutely everything men believe about how salvation should be won and in what form it should take. And unless we realize that, we'll have no gospel here in this church, we'll have no power and we will see no true conversion. We have to be willing to join our master in being a SCANDAL.
That we preach Christ crucified in such a way as to exhault God almighty and to humble men, so that in learning to despise themselves, they esteem the gospel and are saved. The worst thing that could ever happen to a preacher and the worst thing that could ever happen to a church is to become civilized and respectable, for in that lies no power. We are pilgrims, we are strangers, we are awkward, we are dislocated, we find no home here, no place where we properly fit, because we have a city who's builder and maker is God. Our job is to take a gospel so covered up by the designs of men that it no longer has any power. It is our job to stip away all that faulty dress and to preach the bare bones of a gospel that is nothing more than a scandal, but in THAT we will see the power of God.
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