Well, first of all, thank you, Steve, for that vitally, vitally important subject. Thank you, Chris, for such a kind introduction. I did not know the firestorm that the gospel according to Jesus would cause when I wrote that book. I was profoundly exercised when I wrote it. I will admit that. because I felt that the gospel was being misrepresented, and that it was being misrepresented at the heart of the tradition that I came from. I was shocked at the misrepresentation of the gospel that I felt was coming out of the seminary that was the bastion of my own heritage. And I will admit that I wrote that with a fire in my heart, that book. And I remember Zondervan that published the book and brought it out said that they thought it would sell about 25,000 copies. but they didn't understand what would happen if someone stepped on the oxygen at Dallas Seminary and cut off their air. So, it went way, way beyond that initially and did cause a firestorm. And you know, it became a defining moment in my own life. When I came out of seminary, I had been prepared in seminary to fight battles over inerrancy. biblical inspiration, to fight battles over what Steve was talking about, paradigms of sanctification, true and false, and to understand what true sanctification was. Never did I believe that I would spend my life trying to defend the gospel from evangelical attacks. That was a total shock. And when I wrote that, I essentially distanced myself from my own tradition. And I wound up for a little bit in the process of that, a lost soul, until in studying for that very book, I can say that I fully and with all the passion of my heart embraced Reformed theology. And it started with its soteriology at its basic subjective level. What does it mean to put your faith in Jesus Christ? And it hasn't stopped. It was the gospel according to Jesus, and then I wrote an answer to all the reaction called The Gospel According to the Apostles, and then came Ashamed of the Gospel, and the same effort to clarify the gospel, then came Hard to Believe, and now comes Slave. And I just keep trying to address the fact that evangelicals are not rightly representing the gospel. How can, after all these years, we not get that? That seems to be the reality of it. I'm very thankful that the Lord in His wonderful providence and grace just kind of blended me in to this movement. At the same time, you were coming along, and a few others were coming along, and Jim Boyce was raising the profile of all of these things. And, you know, this was brand new from the category that I came from. to take on a subject like that at that level and take that approach. And I needed some new companions, and so I'm grateful. One of the most prominent preachers in America that all of you would know, when that book came out, called me up and said, I have to meet with you right now. And I said, sure, I'd be glad to. We went to lunch, and he said, you have divided the body of Christ in a massive way by the writing of that book. And I just asked him, is it true? If it's not true, then write an answer. Tell me where it's not true." But the point that he was making was the point that I felt, that there was an immediate alienation. But that's okay. This is something we have to get right. This is something we have to get right. Some of us can be wrong about baptism. This we have to get right. Now you would think that with the massive onslaught of this great work that is pouring out of the Reformed minds, that the questions would be resolved, that everybody would get on board And as Steve said, that you'd finally see it and then see it everywhere, the sovereignty of God in the gracious work of salvation. But we still have battles to fight, and battles to fight at this very basic foundational level around the gospel. And one of the battles is, believe it or not, the necessity of believing the gospel of Jesus Christ to be saved. There is much movement in evangelicalism to espouse the idea that you don't need to believe the gospel to be saved. The message of Christianity has always been the message of faith in Christ. The content of that objectively is found in the gospel facts of history recorded in Scripture. We have always affirmed that. That has been the core of true biblical understanding since the New Testament. True Christians have always believed that the only way sinners can be rescued from eternal hell is to believe the gospel, to acknowledge Christ. For centuries, Christians have given their lives and shed their blood to make that message known. For centuries, they have spent their fortunes to send missionaries to the farthest corners of the world who, in many cases, have given their lives there, either in life or in death, to get the one message that saves, apart from which no one can be saved. This is what we have believed. Salvation comes only to those who believe the truth concerning Jesus Christ, His person and His work. And here it is, this really pathetic irony that in our time, with greater means than ever to proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth, the church has become confused as to whether that is even necessary. embarrassed by the realities of sin and hell, fearful of offending the perishing by calling them to repent and confess Jesus as Lord, and trying desperately to save God from being responsible for anyone's condemnation. We have raised questions about whether People even need to hear the gospel. After all, God loves you just the way you are, as we heard earlier. We have questions about the lordship of Christ. We have lots of questions about the doctrine of justification. We have confusion about the doctrine of imputation. We have a whole lot of confusion as well about faith. Is it even necessary to believe in Jesus Christ? So the question that I've been given in this session is, do people have to hear the gospel and believe it to be saved? The biblical answer is yes, and that's what we've always believed, and that's what we've always preached and given our lives generation after generation to proclaim. But we have some new ideas. I'll just give you some, maybe some categories and then some people to sort of set the scene a little bit. There is a movement that falls under the title natural theology. You may have been reading a little bit about that. Natural theology suggests that a man has natural reasoning powers to bring himself to God without the Bible and without the gospel. He is able to know enough about God to satisfy a sort of divine minimum requirement without Scripture. One source of that we might understand, this I drew out of the LA Times. The Pope, interpreting the Second Vatican Council, says, and I quote, the gospel teaches us that those who live in accordance with the Beatitudes and who bear lovingly the sufferings of life will enter God's kingdom, close quote. We might concede that the Catholics would believe that. The biblical teaching that salvation only comes in response to faith in Jesus Christ is rejected. It is rejected as unreasonably cruel. And the heathen are saved if they just live good lives and are sincere, and as Peter Kreeft tried to say in Ecumenical Jihad, they are essentially monotheistic. In fact, Peter Kreeft says in that book, endorsed by Chuck Colson and Jim Packer, that even atheists will be in heaven if they sought to find out if, in fact, there was a God. So don't be surprised, says Peter Kreeft, Roman Catholic, if you enter heaven and see Hindus and Muslims. In fact, Muslims, for the most part, are better Christians than Christians. The book is Ecumenical Jihad, endorsed by J.I. Packer and Charles Colson on the back cover. There was an interesting interview, very interesting interview on the Hour of Power, one of my favorite television programs. I switch from R.C. Sproul to Robert Shuler often. One broadcast of the Hour of Power, this is 1997, and I ordered the transcript of it because I was so amazed at it. The guest was Billy Graham, Billy Graham, the leading evangelist of the world. Billy Graham is having a conversation with Robert Shuler, and here is the conversation. Mr. Graham said, I think everybody that loves Christ or knows Christ, whether they are conscious of it or not, they're members of the body of Christ, whether they come from the Muslim world, the Buddhist world, or the Christian world. or the non-believing world. They're members of the body of Christ because they've been called by God. They may not even know the name of Jesus, but they know they need something, and I think they're saved, and they're going to be with us in heaven." That was Billy Graham, not Robert Shuler. To which Billy Graham responds again, I've met people in tribal situations, they've never seen a Bible, heard about a Bible, never heard of Jesus, but they've believed in their hearts that there is a God, and they've tried to live a life that's apart from the community in which they lived. To which Robert Shuler said, there's a wideness in God's mercy. To which Mr. Graham said, there is, there definitely is. We're not talking about something that's on the fringes, folks. Is any of that conversation a reflection of the truth that we believe about the necessity of the gospel? It doesn't matter whether they know the name of Jesus or have ever heard the gospel. Perhaps on a more academic front, if I had the choice, I'd choose to keep this there, so let me fix it. If we get on a more academic front, we run into a man who, through the years, metamorphosed continually by the name of Clark Pinnock, and I'm quoting from him, when we approach the man of faith, he started out as an evangelical, when we approach the man of faith other than our own faith, It will be with a spirit of expectancy to find out how God has been speaking to him and what new understanding of the grace and love of God we may discover in this encounter. Pinnock goes on to say, our task in approaching another people, another culture, another religion is to take off our shoes because the place we are approaching is holy ground. we may forget that God was there before our arrival," end quote. And then Pinnock said this, God has more going on by way of redemption than what happened in first century Palestine. Raymond Pinnickian wrote a book called The Unknown Christ of Hinduism. There's a bizarre title, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism. And in it, he says this, and I quote, page 54, the good and bona fide Hindu is saved by Christ, and not by Hinduism. But it is through the sacraments of Hinduism, through the message of morality and the good life, that the mysticism that comes down to him through Hinduism is a mysticism by which Christ saves that Hindu. A popular television charismatic pastor down in Texas, John Hagee, says the Jews don't have to believe in Christ. They don't have to believe the gospel. They can be saved by another means. And he advocates this all the time. A book written a few years ago and published by Moody Press called Totally Saved, written by Dr. Tony Evans, says that people who've never heard the gospel will be saved by being transdispensationalized. Coins that word. That is, they will be treated as if they lived prior to Christ's arrival. Have you had enough? You want more, that's enough for me. Are we wasting our time sending out missionaries? Are we wasting our time preaching the gospel? Are we just making things worse? Because if they're saved without the message, the message can only then potentiate their damnation. Now I know that you know that Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by Me. I know that you know that, John 14, 6, Acts 4, 12. There's not salvation available in any other name under heaven given among men, only the name of Christ by which we are to be saved. You know those positive things, but let's take a different approach. than just to recite those verses, or I would be done now, and I have a few more minutes to fill. So let's… let's come at this a little bit differently, and let's ask the question, does the unaided pagan have in himself the ability to come to any saving knowledge of God, left to himself? Well, if you have any sensible biblical doctrine of depravity, you know the answer. Of course, but let's expand that a little bit and look at some Scripture passages that I think might enrich us. You know, we could actually start in Genesis 3, and you can always start there, but we can start there by saying, if man by his own reason could know God savingly, then we would assume that there would have been a really big advantage to Adam and Eve before they fell. Did Adam and Eve have the natural powers in their sinless condition? Did they have with perfect minds and perfect reason the capability naturally to understand why they were created and exactly what God required of them? Would they have known intuitively what to do, what not to do, what to eat, what not to eat? Does natural theology put you in line with the purposes and the will and the plans and the requirements and the mandates of God? Many of these natural theologians, I suppose, would be shocked to have to face the reality that even Adam and Eve couldn't know what God required and what God denied them by any means of their perfect reason unless God had revealed it to them. God had to tell them, don't eat this, eat this. Marry this woman that showed up this morning. Name the animals. Take care of the garden. Adam is not the origin of truth. Adam is not the origin of justice, duty, morality, meaning, beauty. The Creator God is the origin of all of that, and it was all given to Him in times of special revelation day by day when God walked and talked with Adam. God had to come down and find Adam every day and give Adam His requirements. No one can understand God unaided by special revelation, and even in His unfallen condition, He would not intuitively have been able to do the will of God and to please God if He had not heard from God what God required. And since the Fall, whatever hope there would be for a perfect human being to know and obey the will of God is so far corrupted that we would agree that no fallen, corrupted individual could ever intuitively please God by his own human reasonings. Man cannot please God apart from obedience to His revelation. And according to the seventeenth chapter of Acts, now God requires all men to repent and believe in the one He raised from the dead. Where does man left to himself get? Does he get to God? Does he get to God savingly? Is God impressed with His intuition, with His mystical meanderings through His own human reason and the collective reason of whatever pagan community He's submitted Himself to or subjected to? Is God pleased? Is that a path to God? Let me show you a few passages. Let's start in Romans 1. And there's a lot that can be said about this. from a lot of portions of Scripture, but what time does this session end, Chris? 3.30? Oh. Okay. Well, I'll tell you a few things. I just, I want you to get the picture of Romans 1, verse 14. I'm under obligation to both Greeks and barbarians, wise and foolish. What is that obligation? For my part, I'm eager to do what? Preach the gospel. I'm not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the non-Jew. Everyone in the world is is targeted here by the Apostle Paul in this discharge of his debt to proclaim the only message that saves, which is the gospel. He is a debtor. He is obligated to those who are Jews, to those who are Greeks, to those who are educated, to those who are uneducated, because there is no other way to be saved. Verse 18 then is that very compelling statement, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. This is the problem with the human race, with the natural man. He suppresses the truth that He has. He doesn't go from the truth that He has to greater light on His own. He goes the other way. That which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. He has reasoning power. He has deductive powers which would lead Him back to an original source, a first cause. He has enough reasoning power to go back through the steps of logic to using cause and effect reasoning, which is how we reason about everything, to go back to the first cause and understand that the one who caused this is a glorious, creative power, verse 20, with invisible attributes, eternal power, a divine nature, and that is so evident and so obvious that man is without excuse. Now here's the key point. This isn't enough to save him. This is just enough to damn him without excuse. And he doesn't go from there to the truth. He goes from there to error. He starts down. They know God. They don't honor Him as God. They don't give Him thanks. They become futile in their speculation. Their foolish heart is darkened. Professing to be wise, they become morons. That's the Greek word, moron. It is. It's a Greek word. and they exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for an image of the form of corruptible man, birds four-footed." You know the passage. So what happens is man is given reasoning power to take him back to God, and he can know a lot about the attributes of God by looking at the world around him, power and beauty and order and structure and design and personality, all of those things. And his reason takes him back to that cause. And when he gets there, he starts down, and his heart's darkened, and he corrupts what he knows because that's all he can do. Left to himself, man is an inexcusable religious moron. That's where he's going to end up. and God is going to bring His judgment and His wrath on him. Man's nature with natural revelation, if you want to call it that, will only make him a proud, foolish, empty, evil, corrupt sinner who will have no excuse when he stands before God. Romans 2 even says he has a moral set. in his mind. He has a structure of morality, the law of God written in his heart. But even the Jews, with the law of God written in their heart and the law of God written in Scripture, were judged and condemned. So man left to himself, with only his aided powers, aided by the corporate influence of the community of the pagans around him is going to end up as an inexcusable moron who develops a false religion. Now to further understand this, and we're moving pretty fast because I want to cover a few of these, 1 Corinthians chapter 1, and this is going to be another few, so keep your Bible handy. 1 Corinthians chapter Here we have another very important insight into a category of people. In verse 18, there are two categories of people here. There are those who are perishing, those who are present-tense perishing. That's a category of people. That's all the unregenerate people. They're the perishing people, okay? Those who are perishing. And then there There's another group mentioned in verse 18, those who are being saved, those who are in the process of salvation. And while salvation is, of course, at its initiation not a process but a divine miracle, there is following the first phase of salvation, which is justification, regeneration, conversion, all of that, sanctification, and then glorification. So those who belong to the being saved, going from justification through sanctification to glorification, that's one category. The other category is the perishing. So let's look at the perishing and ask the question, what characterizes the perishing? Well, the first thing we find in verse 18 is that the word of the cross is to them foolishness. And here we have the same word again, moron. It's morons for whom the truth is moronic. They reject the gospel. They reject the Word of the Cross as the gospel. They reject the gospel. This is categorically true. Perishing people reject the gospel. So, they are inexcusably incapable of coming to God without the gospel, and to make it even worse, if you give them the gospel, they will reject the gospel. Why would they do that? Because the message is unacceptable. It is foolishness to them. It is beneath them. They laughed at the Apostle Paul. They mocked him. He preached Christ all the time, and they were unimpressed by him. His presence is unimpressive, and his speech is despicable. And all he did was preach the gospel. So the category of perishing people are spiritual religious morons without excuse, who even when they hear the gospel, reject the gospel because The message is unacceptable, unreasonable. It's not a rational message, this substitutionary atonement, this salvation by a crucified Jew. Look, Paul had a horrendous time trying to communicate that message with all the rest of the early church in the Gentile world, didn't he? You can go to the Circus Maximus in Rome, and you will find the fading remnants of an amazing carving around Circus Maximus. It's a carving of a crucified figure with the body of a man and the head of a jackass. And underneath, the words, Alexa Menos, a man bowing down, and the words, Alexa Menos worships his God. Who would worship a crucified jackass? That was the world's view. That was a tough sell to tell the Roman world, a world where everybody wanted freedom in a world of slavery, that they needed to become slaves to a crucified Jew. That's a tough sell. The whole message was idiocy. But not only is it unreasonable, it's unattainable. Verse 19. And here he borrows from Isaiah 29, it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, the cleverness of the clever I will set aside. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? Then this statement in 21, since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God. You can't get to God from that path. It can't be done. On the other hand, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. Friends, that's the Great Commission in different words. The only hope of salvation is through the preaching of the message of the Word of the cross and the hearing and believing. That's the only hope. So they had an unreasonable message. They had a message that was unattainable from the human perspective. The message is unreasonable. The message is unattainable. And to make things more difficult, in verses 26 to 28, it says the people preaching it are unremarkable. Not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble, foolish, weak. base, despised, things that are not, things meaning people who are absolutely nobody's. You have an unreasonable message about salvation in someone who claimed to be God and was crucified by the Romans, rejected by the people He came to save the Jews. And that's supposed to be the God of the universe and the only Savior? That is unreasonable. Even worse, it's unattainable. Even worse, its preachers are unremarkable and unimpressive and unfashionable. It comes down into chapter 2. That's where He says, I was with you in weakness, fear, trembling. my message, my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power." So how is anybody going to believe? I mean, this is impossible. Not only it is impossible for the unregenerate to be saved apart from the gospel, it's impossible for the unregenerate to be saved with the gospel. They can't get there without it, and on their own, are you ready for this? They can't get there with it. But Paul says, I keep preaching it. Why do you keep preaching it, Paul? Why do you keep preaching it? His answer comes in verse 30 and 31 of chapter 1 by – I love this – if you haven't seen the sovereignty of God clearly before, see it now. By His doing, you're in Christ Jesus. The only way anybody will ever be saved is by His doing. who became to us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that just as it is written, let him who boasts," what? Boasts in the Lord. Why did the Lord design it this way? So that he gets what? All the glory. All the glory. Paul says in chapter 2, look, I preach the way I preach so that your faith doesn't rest on the wisdom of men, but on the what? Power of God. So the people in the category of the perishing, the world of unbelievers, aren't going to be saved on their own without the gospel. They aren't even going to be saved on their own with the gospel, but they're not going to be saved without the gospel. But when they are saved with the gospel, they're going to be saved by the power of God who saves them. To add to the same kind of thoughts, drop down in chapter 2 of 1 Corinthians to verse Who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of a man which is in him? Even so, the thoughts of God, no one knows except the Spirit of God." I've got news for you. You have no idea on your own what God thinks. This is ludicrous. Some guy somewhere in the world by his own mystical intuition is going to discern the mind of God? Not a chance. His mind is so corrupt that he thinks like a fallen, corrupt, godless human being, and God doesn't think that way. So, the apostle says, the only one who knows the thoughts of God is the Spirit of God. So, the only way we're ever going to know What God thinks and what God desires and what God demands is if they're revealed to us, so we have received, not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts listened with spiritual words. Let me tell you something, any spiritual thought that isn't connected to a spiritual word in the Scripture is wrong. Spiritual thoughts come from spiritual words. This is talking about the revelation of Holy Scripture. Verse 16 says, we have the mind of Christ. That's not a mystical experience. That's not intuitive. That's the Scripture. We have the mind of Christ, the mind of God revealed by the Holy Spirit. And only by that can we know what God desires, what God requires, what God demands. A natural man, let's go back to natural theology, verse 14, doesn't accept the things of the Spirit of God, and we're back to the same word, their foolishness. He can't understand them. They're spiritually appraised. He's spiritually dead and blind. Apart from the revelation of Scripture encompassing the gospel of Jesus Christ, no one in the natural can find his way to God. All the best of human wisdom leads to false religion and ignorance, for which, as we saw in Romans 1, they profess to be wise and give themselves PhDs. Turn to 2 Corinthians chapter 10. A couple more minutes here. 2 Corinthians chapter 10. Talk about spiritual warfare today. There are a lot of people who talk about that and they think it means chasing demons around and telling them what to do. You really don't want to do that. You look silly, first of all, telling demons what to do. I remember being at a big pastor's conference. I don't know if you were there that time, and the moderator, I think you might have been there, stood up to start this great big pastor's conference, and he said, let's pray. And he said, Satan, I thought, whoa, were you there? What? I almost… I was the speaker. I almost fell out of my… Who is he think he is? Satan? Then he started telling Satan what to do. You know, wow. That's not spiritual warfare. Chasing demons. Here's spiritual warfare. Verse 3, 2 Corinthians 10. We walk in the flesh, and we're not talking there about sin, but rather we're human. We're human. This is talking about ministry, how Paul did ministry. You know, we're human, but we don't war according to the flesh. We don't use human weapons, okay? There are no human weapons that are going to work. So the weapons of our warfare are not human, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. Vivid language. We've got to have, I think the King James says, mighty unto God, but divinely powerful is good. Our weapons have to be superhuman, supernatural, transcendent. We can't use human ingenuity, human planning, human technique, human wisdom. It's got to be divine. Why do we have to go to battle on the divine level with divine weapons? Because we're going into a very, very formidable operation for the destruction of fortresses. The Greek word fortress means fort, prison, tomb. Same word. massive granite stone edifices. We're trying to destroy massive fortifications in spiritual warfare. What are they? They're described in verse 5. End of verse 4 talks about, as we said, the destruction of fortresses. The beginning of verse 5, the destruction of logismos, speculations. That means the fortresses are speculations. What is the logismos that NAS calls speculations? It's ideas, ideologies, theories, viewpoints, philosophies, psychologies, religions, any kind of idea. Further follow it. even every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God." Spiritual war is a battle against anti-God ideas. It's a battle for the mind. It's not chasing demons. It's battling for the minds of people whose minds are captive to deadly anti-God ideologies and ideas and theories and viewpoints and religions. We need weapons that smash error. You tell me, what is the only thing that can destroy error? Truth. So He doesn't even have to tell us. We get it. We have to go with divine truth, supernatural, divine truth. And what is our goal? If we're going to do evangelism, this is another great commission passage. We have to smash all wrong thinking about God and take every thought captive to the obedience of whom? Christ. There is no other way for people to be delivered. People are… they have fortified themselves in their damning ideologies. Those fortifications become their prisons and then become their tombs. If we want to rescue people, we have to smash those ideologies and replace them with the truth about Christ and call them to obedience to Him, bringing every thought captive to Christ. No matter how you come at this in the Bible, you always end up with the necessity to proclaim the truth concerning Christ. That is the only thing that frees people from the imprisonment that their damning ideologies hold them in. Go back to 1 Corinthians for a moment. We may not get past Paul's letters to the Corinthians, but there's one other very formidable passage to mark here, and it draws on Deuteronomy 22, and it draws on Psalm 106. But it's 1 Corinthians 10, 19. Paul is talking about this whole problem of food offered to idols. But down in verse 19, he says, an idol isn't anything. No, an idol isn't anything. We agree with that. It is a fabrication. But an important thing to understand is, when people sacrifice to idols, when they worship their idols, their false gods, could we say that that's the best they can do, and that's the most revelation they have, and they're trying their best, and God will accept that? He will accept that as worship of Him? because they don't know any better? Will He say, that's okay, you were trying to worship, and I'll let that be a substitute for Me? I don't think so. Verse 20, the things which the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to what? Yeah, demons. That's demon worship. That's what Hindus do. That's what Jehovah's Witnesses do. That's what Mormons do. They worship demons, not God. That's where you go with natural theology. That's where you go with that kind of thinking. You end up worshiping demons every single time. Demons. Demon worship. When I was in Russia, I was meeting a group of pastors in closed session, all the leading pastors of the evangelical church in Russia, and they said, because they hadn't really had a lot of training, they said, isn't Allah the same as Jehovah God? And I didn't know the question would come up. I said, no, no, He is not. Those who worship Allah worship demons. There is no Allah, al-ilah, the God. There is no Allah. There is only the demons that impersonate Him. Natural theology will get you to worshiping demons and before God without an excuse. The only way to be saved is through the gospel of Jesus Christ. Why do you think Jesus said, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature? That's the only way. I wish I had time to talk about Romans 10. That was the best part of this message. Wow. You took all my time, Steve. Faith, no, no, I can't do that. I've got to catch an airplane, I've got to preach in church tomorrow. Look, Romans 10, let's sum it up. Whoever calls upon the Lord shall be saved. How will they call on Him? They haven't heard. You need more? How can they hear if they don't have a preacher? How are they going to have a preacher unless they're sent? This isn't brain surgery. That's why we've been doing this for 2,000 years, sending preachers to the ends of the earth, right? Because faith, saving faith, comes by hearing the message concerning Christ. We better pray. Let's pray. If I get my second wind, we're all in trouble. Father, we thank You from the depths of our hearts that Your Word is so clear. We love it. We love it so deeply. And what we love about it is its life-giving power. And that comes because it's clear to us. not because we're noble and mighty and brilliant, not because we're the elite minds, but in its majestic simplicity, its message is unmistakable so that a wayfaring stranger, though he be a fool, need not err, so that even a child could understand. The world must hear the message of Jesus Christ. May we never be so content with our theology never so content with our privilege of being saved by sovereign grace that we forget that our great God has not only saved us, chosen us, but He's chosen us to be the means by which He will save others, make us faithful in the relentless proclamation of the glorious gospel of Christ. for His honor and glory forever and ever. And everyone said, Amen.