that, if you pray and ask Jesus Christ to come into your heart, He will definitely come in. You
will not find that in any place in Scripture. You will not find that anywhere in Baptist history
until about 50 years ago. What you need to know is that salvation is by faith and faith alone in
Jesus Christ. And faith alone in Jesus Christ is preceded and followed by repentance . . . a
turning away from sin, a hatred for the things that God hates and a love for the things that God
loves, a growing in holiness and a desire not to be like Britney Spears, not to be like the world,
and not to be like the great majority of American Christians, but to be like Jesus Christ!
[The audience then erupts in applause].
I don’t know why you’re clapping. I’m talking about you. I didn’t come here to get amens. I didn’t come here to be applauded. I’m talking about you.
People so many times come up to me and say, “Oh, I’d love to follow you into Romania”; “I’d love to follow you into the Ukraine”; “I’d love to preach where you preached and planted churches in Peru in the jungle.”
And I tell them, “No, you wouldn’t.”
They say, “Yes, I would.”
I say, “No, you wouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because you’d be excommunicated from the church down there.”
What we need to see . . . I’m not trying to be hard for the sake of being hard. Do you realize how much love it takes to stand before 5,000 people and tell them that American Christianity is almost totally wrong? Do you know what it’s going to cost me to never be asked back again to something like this? To be unpopular? Do you know why you do it? You don’t do it because you get paid well. You don’t do it because men love you. You do it because you love men and because, more than that, you want to honor God.
I want to tell you something. We’re going to go into Scripture, and I want you to look at it as it really is. It’s not comparing yourself with others who call themselves Christians. Compare yourself to the Scripture. When someone, a young person, comes to a pastor or a youth minister and says, “I’m not sure whether or not I’m saved,” the youth minister will usually throw out a cliché: “Well, was there ever a time in your life when you prayed and asked Jesus to come into your heart?”
“Well, yes.”
“Were you sincere?”
“Well, I don’t know, but I think so.”
“Well, you need to tell Satan to stop bothering you. Did you write it in the back of your book . . . the back of your Bible like the evangelist told you when you got saved, write down the date so that any time you doubted you could point him to the Bible?”
What superstition has overcome our denomination? Do you know what the Bible tells Christians to do? Examine yourself. Test yourself in light of Scripture to see if you are in the faith. Test yourself to see if you’re a Christian.
Do you realize if I dismissed us right now and told everyone to go knock on every door in this city, do you know what we would find out? Ninety-nine percent of the people, at least, in this city believe themselves to be believers. If you go back to your hometown and knock on every door . . . because I went back to my hometown after I got saved and knocked on every door, and you know what I found out? Everyone in my town is a Christian. Eighty-five percent of them do not go to church, and those who do go to church are not concerned about holiness. They’re not concerned about serving. They’re not concerned about being separate from the world. They’re not concerned about the Gospel being preached among the nations. But, bless God, they’re saved.
Why are they saved? Because some evangelist who should have spent less time preaching and
more time studying his Bible told them they were saved, and he did it so he could brag about
how many came forward in his next revival.
I love you, and there are men here who love you. And I want to go into Scripture now, now that
I’ve shocked you into light. I want you to listen to me. Listen to the Word of God and begin to
ask yourself some questions. First of all, Enter through the narrow gate for the gate is wide and
the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. There is a
narrow gate.
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