It was the Fall of 1999, and I sat as a spellbound 16 year old in a small church in Stillwater, Oklahoma, listening to a man named Jim preach a passionate, although poorly prepared sermon on how and why the Church should evangelize.
It was not the cleverness of his message or the smoothness of his delivery that had me raptured; in fact, the message was rather crude and lacking in form.
It was the Truth that I was hearing for what felt like the first time that had caught my full attention.
The Truths found in the message were in fact very simple:
1. God is holy, righteous and good. (Gen-Rev)
2. God’s Law brings the knowledge of sin to the human heart. (Romans 3:20)
3. God’s Law is a tudor to lead us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. (Gal 3:24)
4. When we share the Gospel with sinners, we should first use the Law of God (primarily the 10 commandments) to till the soil of the person’s heart & help show them that they will be judged by God and that they do need a Savior. (Rom 3:19-20, Hebrews 9:27)
5. Because of God’s amazing salvation given to us sinners, we as a Church should be ovewhelmed with compassion towards those who are still in their sins. Evangelism should be as natural to the Christian as eating and sleeping.
Before that night, my understanding of God was, more than anything else, vague. To me, God was vaguely holy, because I lacked understanding of God’s law and righteousness. God was vaguely good, because I didn’t fully understand the truth of the Cross, that Christ died to redeem us from ‘the curse of the law’. God was vaguely a ‘loving God’, but his love didn’t make a lot of sense until I saw how amazing it was in the light of how sinful and rebellious and undeserving my own heart was. All my life, God never seemed to have hardly any substance; He was always there, but there was no defining attributes in my mind that painted a full Biblical picture of His character.
That all began to change with Jim’s message (that he actually took mostly from Ray Comfort’s sermon, “Hell’s Best Kept Secret”) preached on that evening in 1999.
I began to see God for who He really is: a God who loves righteousness and hates sin, a holy God who demands perfection, a loving God who would stoop to be condemned for a wretch (an enemy of God) like me. God’s goodness and mercy finally began to make sense. I broke God’s law and deserved to be cursed for my rebellion, but Jesus became a curse for me, paying for my sins with His life’s blood.
I was never the same again. The Bible made sense. Life made sense. Salvation made sense. Evangelism made sense. I understood clearly what I had been saved from, and it quickly became clear what I had been saved for. This new, Biblical understanding of God and the Gospel had wrecked me for life (in a good way).
(If you feel that I am putting a lot of stress on how impacting this one particular message was to me, I want you to know that I am not exagerating! Please, please, please, please, please… listen to the message “Hell’s Best Kept Secret” or read the book. Hopefully you won’t need to hear this message as much as I did…but you never know!)
