That's a great song. It is Psalm 121. The phrase that always jumps out at me is that the Lord promises to sustain us from evils behind and before. Anyway, that means he sustains us. He never sleeps. So even while we're sleeping, he protects us from evils that are in front of us, the ones we can see, right? He's also protecting us from the evils that are behind us that we can't see, and those are even, it seems like, the most dangerous that sneak up on you, but none of them sneak up on the Lord. The scripture reading is 1 Corinthians chapter one, 1 Corinthians chapter one, and I thought it would be good for us to, as we're going through this series, read the first chapter and get the flow of it here in its entirety. And so let's do that. 1 Corinthians 1, beginning in verse 1. Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus and our brother Sosthenes, to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech, and all knowledge, even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you, so that you're not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end, guiltless, in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. For it's been reported to me by Chloe's people that there's quarreling among you, my brothers. What I mean is that each one of you says, I follow Paul, or I follow Apollos, or I follow Cephas, or I follow Christ. Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. I did baptize also the household of Stephanus. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else. For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel. and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. For it's written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Where's the one who's wise? Where's the scribe? Where's the debater of this age? Is not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to the worldly standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption so that as it is written, let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. There is the word of God and we are to receive it then as such. Well, as we come to this first chapter again for a closer look, in this series on Paul's letter to the Corinthians. Let's ask the Lord's blessing then on the ministry of his word. Father, we now look into your book. We know that it is yours. We know that it is the word of God. We believe it, we confess it, and we pray that the power of it by your Holy Spirit would work now in our minds and hearts and among us that we might understand your truth, that we might love it, that we might obey it. Show us, Father, sin that we need to repent of. We pray also that your word would encourage us and enable us to remain on that narrow way that leads to life and not be dissuaded from that by the deceptions of the devil. And we pray this in Christ's name, amen. Well, here is this church at Corinth. We come to, once again, you remember the apostle Paul had spent 18 months there, quite a while. Can you imagine having the, Apostle Paul come here and teach us for a year and a half, that would be pretty, so they had incredible benefit. But as is true today of so many local churches, and it was then, already the church at Corinth was in trouble. They had separated into factions, and what was the cause? Well, we've seen that. It's their arrogance, it is their pride, and a foolish desire especially to be regarded as great, as wise. according to the world's measure of greatness. They were surrounded and meshed in a culture that worshiped wisdom, right? I mean, when you think of Greece, ancient Greece, you think of what? Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and all of these other philosophers. And so this was the big thing, and eloquence of oratory, and so on. So following those kinds of principles, they began to pick the specific personality that they thought was the best. So well, I like Apollos. I like his take on the gospel. Or I like, well, we like Peter. We're better for these reasons. Or we like Paul. And then the really pious, right? Well, we follow Christ. And most likely, their take on Christ had been altered and distorted then as well. So Paul got right into it, as we've just seen here in the first words of his letter. And he showed them the foolishness of their separation, their factions, he admonished them for distorting the gospel. There's only one gospel. There's only one Christ. You're dividing it into what? You're going to have suddenly four new denominations all of a sudden here? Your little takes on this is foolishness. They were saying, well, you know, Paul has a little bit different nuance on it. And I like that one. And then Peter, well, Peter, he's got a little different emphasis in regards to Christ as well. And so we're going to follow him. So Paul rebukes them. And he's going to actually, he will continue to do so, to admonish them all through this letter, all whatever, there are 16 chapters, something like that. And that's what he's doing. He's confronting their pride and their worldliness. You'll see it. He'll still be at it in chapter three. Here's a sample, chapter three, verses three to four. For you are still of the flesh. For while there's jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, I follow Paul, and another, I follow Apollos, are you not being merely human? In other words, you're acting just like the worldlings around you, rather than the saints that Christ has called you to be. Now, this division within the church is surely the work of Satan. It is a favorite tactic. Why? Because he knows full well that Christ said to his people, you are to love one another. By this, the world will know that you're my disciples. So one of the most fundamental means of us being a witness for Christ to the world is that we love one another. I mean, you think about it. If people in the community know that Christians are all divided and they fight with one another and they put down one another, this kind of thing, and the world knows that, how are they gonna react when we try to to tell them about Christ and the salvation in him. So Satan knows this and he's always at work, always at work trying to get us to be prideful, exalt ourselves and so on, and divide then into factions. You have people, we've run across this before, well this church, what's this church? This church is primarily about my music and the music ministry, see how great I am. Or this church is about me as a teacher. Look how great I am. Or this church is about getting large numbers of peoples, buildings, and so on. Look at how great we are. Pride, pride, pride. Our goal is to be highly thought of in the community. What a great place we are. That's what we're after, you see. So automatically, when someone is walking in pride, and they become consumed by it, they immediately are looking for what? They're looking for a following. And that creates, then, division. Well, we stand with Apollos. Well, we stand with Paul. And you can easily translate that into examples that are contemporary, then, with our own day. And so Paul proceeds to admonish them and to teach them about truths that are non-negotiable. And that is to say the things that he is setting forth here are things that, if we don't understand and believe, we cannot follow Christ in truth. You know, I will arrogantly desire and practice a Christianity that has little to do with Christ and really is all about me, that kind of a thing. Because think about it. In Corinth, when somebody said, I am of Apollos, well, what they're really saying is, And so I'm better than everybody else. I'm with him. This is a celebrity thing. I've got Apollos' autograph. And so the glory, then, is mine. Listen to Paul say it again. Christ did not send me to baptize. And he means that primarily. But to preach the gospel, not with words of eloquent wisdom, Wisdom of the world. Now look at this. We'll talk more about it. Lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing. But to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. So here you have contrasted. In 1 Corinthians here, Paul is contrasting the wisdom of the world versus the wisdom of God, right? The foolishness of man versus the wisdom of God. The wisdom of God viewed as foolishness then by the world, and the wisdom of the world viewed as foolishness for what it is then by the Lord. So these are the themes. that Paul is going to put before us here over and over again until we get it. He'll be at it in the second chapter still, 1 Corinthians 2. And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. Now, he'd already said that. We read it earlier, right? I didn't come with words of eloquent wisdom. See, you keep this in mind. The Greeks were big on this, oratory, eloquence of speech. Boy, that was great. It was almost as if as long as a guy could say stupidity eloquently, then he's a great guy, and everyone would listen to him. And there's nothing new under the sun. That still happens then today. But Paul says, you know, I didn't come to you that way with lofty speech or wisdom. I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and much trembling. And my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. Now you see the principle here. The gospel, the word of God, the word of the cross is powerful. It's as Paul says in Romans chapter one, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. It's the power of God unto salvation, right? But, but Paul is warning these Corinthians and us and he's saying, if you mess with the gospel, If you fool around here and you start presenting it to people with this eloquent speech and oratory, and you're thinking then, oh, by doing that, I can make the sale. I can make the gospel more presentable to people. So you're tweaking the gospel. And what Paul says, if you do that, the gospel is going to be emptied of its power. and it won't be the power unto salvation. Not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. You know, in most local churches today, and I mean this goes on all the time, when a congregation is looking for a pastor, The kinds of criteria that people use to evaluate whether a particular candidate is the one they should call or not are completely, well, they're just stupid. They're just stupid a lot of times, and it will be Well, you know, I didn't like this aspect of his presentation. Or I didn't, you know, he was kind of boring. Or I didn't really, you know, he's not that good of a speaker. Now, granted, some of those things can come into play if a guy just doesn't have it and puts people to sleep constantly. But what's the mistake? They're looking at the man as if he primarily is what's important. But what's really important? What's Paul saying? It's the message. What's he preaching, right? What is it? Is it the word of the cross? the power of God then is going to be there. But oftentimes people will, churches will call somebody simply because, oh wow, what a moving speaker. The whole congregation was moved to tears. I heard Lloyd Jones, I've been reading him, and he said that Emotionalism in and of itself is dangerous because being moved to tears through emotionalism because of a dynamic speaker telling some kind of a heart-wrenching story or something is entirely different than coming to faith in Christ as a result of hearing the gospel and then being saved. Well, Paul had these critics at Corinth. False teachers had come in. We see that particularly in 2 Corinthians. But they used the simplicity of Paul's preaching. They used the fact that he didn't come in eloquence of speech and so on. And he purposely did that. He purposely did that so the gospel would not become, well, so the Holy Spirit wouldn't abandon his preaching, you see. But his critics used the simplicity of his preaching as a means to accuse him. So you see over in 2 Corinthians 10, for they, these false teachers, they say, oh, his letters, you know, when he writes to you, his letters are weighty and strong. But his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account. And so there's these false teachers doing that. Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power, its power to save. So let's take a closer look at that. The gospel of Christ is the fundamental and foundational truth of the Christian religion. The word of the cross has to always remain the word of the cross. It cannot be altered in the slightest. Everything else depends upon it. You see it here in Ephesians 2. So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but your fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him, you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. So what's happening here? At Corinth, really, the gospel was being emptied of its power. How? The Corinthians were approaching it in a worldly manner, and some kind of alteration, some kind of tweaking was going on, messing with the word of the cross. And it was, they were probably subtle, subtle changes. But so that the gospel was being emptied of its power, so that the gospel really wasn't the gospel then anymore, you see. So Paul had told the Ephesians, Christ is the cornerstone, the cornerstone of the church. And then the apostles come along as he appoints them, and they preach Christ and him crucified. And they are part, then, of that structure. But Christ is the cornerstone. And all they're doing is preaching and teaching his word. They're not changing anything, then, at all. And so the church, then, The church grows by the power of the gospel, by the power of the word of Christ being proclaimed then. So think of this. If the cornerstone, the foundational first marker, stone, is laid down, the cornerstone, in building a stone building, all right, And if that cornerstone isn't laid down right, if it's out of whack, if it's out of angle and so forth, what's going to happen? Well, it's supposed to be the guide, the mark. Everything else has to follow. And everything else is going to be messed up. And the entire building is going to be wrong. Rome is a huge example of this. Rome, the Roman Catholic Church, is a building built on a false foundation. It is not built upon Christ as the cornerstone. So every part of the building, its priesthood, the papacy, its teaching and its sacraments, its worship, it's all wrong. It's all out of kilter. A foundation of a building has to be laid out square. If you've ever built a building, you know that, right? You're going to lay down the forms to pour the concrete into the foundation. And it takes a lot of work to get those forms so that they are perfectly square. You keep measuring the diagonals and square. until they're the same, and it's just like kind of maddening, you know, I got to move this part a little bit. And I remember asking a contractor that I knew one time when we were building our garage, and I said, how close do you have to be, you know, on maybe a 40 or a 36 by 24, and you're measuring, how close do you have to be? He said, no more than an eighth of an inch. You better, and dead on is better, because what you find out if you're building a building, and you don't get it right, and the foundation's not square, that error is going to permeate every single subsequent step of the building process. You're going to fight it in framing the building. You're going to fight it in the roof trusses. You're going to fight it putting up four by eight sheets of siding, the whole thing, constantly. That's what Rome is. Rome is not built. on the cornerstone of Christ. And neither are many local churches. They may show lots of numerical growth and so on, but they're not building on the word of the cross. They've altered the word. And it's really rather frightening and scary how little and the devil is a master at this, how little the gospel can be altered and the power of God just be gone, all right? I mean, this is something we have to be extremely sensitive to. Remember how Paul said something like, you know, if I wanted to please man, If I wanted to preach a message that sounded like wisdom to the natural man, and then I would be popular, he said, if that was my goal, I would not be a servant of Christ, because the two are absolutely incompatible. So that means that any time a preacher, a local church, so-called any Christian entity Any time they tweak the gospel so that suddenly it becomes acceptable and regarded as wisdom by the world, they've just shot the whole building. They are building on a false gospel then, you see. It becomes entirely man-centered. Here's an example. off of, you know, it's interesting and kind of discouraging also if you go around to church websites. And when I do that, I always look first of all at their mission statement or their vision statement or whatever it might be. And it's very telling about the kind of message that they're preaching. Here's an example. They said, we are, this is on the front page of their webpage. We are also aware of the hurts and struggles of everyday life. In this exact moment, God sees both your struggles and joys. Our desire as a church is to share with people the life-changing message of Jesus Christ and how the truth of the Bible speaks to our everyday struggles and longings. Now, to most people, that sounds all great. Well, yeah, they want to present Christ to people and so on. But I would submit to you that that statement is all about man. It's all about man. God sees your struggles and joys. That's what our gospel that we're going to present a Jesus to you who will deal with all of your struggles and joys, you see. That's not the gospel. That is not it. Paul says of this kind of a tweaked gospel, even if we are an angel of heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. And then he repeats it then again. Oh, and this is where that passing, verse 10, For am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. So you see, that's what Paul is telling us there. He's saying, don't expect the message of the word of the cross. Don't expect the gospel that we are to preach. Don't expect it to please man. It isn't going to please man. Well, the Corinthians were emptying the cross, then, of Christ and its power to save. They were dressing it up so that the word of the cross would be regarded as eloquent wisdom. Now, I told you that this is scary. And here's the scary part, because it would be so easy to slide into. Not only do we change the gospel when we mess with the content, with the meat of it, the message itself, we also can remove, we can cause the power of God to vacate our preaching and our witness to others by altering the method in how we present it. And that's really what Paul primarily is saying here. I didn't come to you with eloquent speech. See, the method that we preach the gospel, the method that we share the gospel, then, with the lost can strip it of its power, too, if it's not the right method. Why? Listen again, my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. So what Paul is saying here, look it, when I came to you, I didn't come to you preaching the gospel in the tone of this hot shot, preacher that just wows everyone, oh man, that guy can speak. Even if the content were right, if what we do is we utilize a method of preaching Christ, which actually turns out to be a method that's about me. So that, look it, if I can just impress these people through eloquence of speech and so on, then I can close the deal. I can have, you know, recently I heard a report of a famous, well-known preacher, evangelist, and so forth, speaking, and the headline is like, hundreds decide for Christ. I mean, this was just last week. Hundreds decide for Christ, you see. Well, sorry, but if hundreds of people might have come forward at the invitation, but we can be assured that they were responding to something other than the gospel, you see. John Owen, do you know John Owen? John Owen lived back in the 1600s. He's a pretty amazing guy. And he lived in the days of Oliver Cromwell. in the days of the civil war between the parliament and the royalists, you know, those days of the evil King Charles. I guess it was the first. They ended up lopping off his head. But so Cromwell became the, what, the protector, I guess they called him, the protector general. And John Owen, he was a Puritan. And Cromwell called on him quite often to consult with him. He even appointed him one time. He appointed him as a chaplain to go with him and his armed forces up into Ireland and up into Scotland. Cromwell didn't want to go. He was a pastor, and he wanted to stay with his congregation. But in the end, Cromwell said, you're going. And so that's a story in and of itself. But John Owen, when he was first a student at Oxford, the King, well, the nation had moved more toward episcopacy, Roman Catholicism, basically, in the Church of England. And William Loud, I think it was, issued this order that everybody in Oxford is gonna follow these particular procedures in worship, which were very Romish, all right? And John Owen would not submit to that, and so they booted him out, they kicked him out. Years later, let's talk about irony, God's irony. Cromwell appointed John Owen as the vice chancellor of Oxford, and so he came back, And he dealt with the wickedness and so forth that was going on there. But one time, he even, kind of a side note here, but the students had become, a lot of them, very licentious and drunkenness, immorality. And he was calling them to accounts. And he was being sure that the gospel was being preached in the chapels. One of the students, it was, you know, that's how they used to do it. The students would do the chapel preaching and the student goes up there and Cromwell had, or John Owen had warned all of them that there was to be no more, get this, there was to be no more profound, profane jestings and so forth. by the speakers in chapel. Well, in defiance, this young guy got up there and started with it again, and Owen warned him one more time, and he just kept it up in defiance. And John Owen just went up there and grabbed him, and pulled him right off the podium, and handed him over to the sergeant at arms, and the school had its own prison, and off to prison the guy went in front of it. So that was the kind of guy John Owen, He was brilliant. But listen to what he says. In this, he's talking about the error of changing the gospel by injecting the wisdom of man into it. Listen to what he says. That which we count, consider, to be our wisdom and learning may, if too rigorously insisted upon, be our folly. When we think that we must sharpen the reasoning of the scriptures, we may end up, he means straightening, that means to hem in, to confine or to bind the power of its spirit. It's oftentimes more effective in the scripture's own freedom, you know, let the scripture say what it says. than when restrained by our methods of arguing, debating. And the weapons of the scripture are keener in their own soft breathings than when sharpened by us in the forge of Aristotle. In other words, you think that in preaching the gospel, You need to inject Aristotle's wisdom or any other kind of worldly wisdom into it in order to convince the person to believe in Christ. You're stripping it of its power. You are binding it then of its power. When I was in seminary, I can give you an example of it. I didn't know it at the time. You go to seminary, conservative school, think you're being taught by the Word of God, and so on. But the preaching class, the big thing there in the preaching classes, I kind of look at preaching this way. Either you're gifted by God and called to preach, or you're not. And a person that's not called by God to preach and gifted to preach, you can't teach them how to do it, you see? And so a lot of homiletics, they call it. Homiletics courses are a waste of time. This one was worse than a waste of time. And again, I didn't realize it at the time. But this is what they emphasize, the big idea. That was it. You had to look at a passage of scripture, maybe five or six verses or maybe a whole chapter or whatever, and you had to distill it down into a short phrase or sentence that capsulizes the whole chapter or the whole section of the text. And then you had to take that capsulized statement of the big idea and put it into your little machine kind of thing, thinking, and translate it into a memorable statement that will grab people's attention. I could spend a lot of time talking about that. That is injecting worldly wisdom onto the text of scripture. I'm even wary of teaching people to outline a portion of scripture, because the outline may not be there, and it end up being something that you are imposing upon the scripture. That's why I like Lloyd-Jones so much. Every one of his sermons, every one of his sermons, you can hear him say it. How does it begin? With some catchy big idea, right? Some contemporary tension grabber. The text which I would like to call your attention to this morning is. And that's it. And then he gets right into the text. And I think that's a perfect example. Example of how you present the gospel to someone apart from worldly wisdom. Look, you think about your unsaved neighbor. I'm sure you do, we pray for them and so forth, and you think, I'd like to have an, and it's easy to slide into, how can I bring up the topic with him? How can I do it in a way that he's gonna listen? How can I convince him? Well, the answer is you can't. That's not your burden to bear. What you can do is open up the Bible and say, look at what God says right here and show him. This is also a danger in the field of what we call apologetics. You know, oh man, here's this book that just proves, and it gives all, and the proofs can be very good and so forth, but unless God is present by his spirit with his power, then nothing is going to happen. Paul emphasizes this, not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. Let me show you from our Lord's own words, how the word of the cross is being so often altered today into a man-pleasing message. And it's very, very common, very typical. I just talk a lot about Lloyd-Jones because he's been an encouragement to me. It's encouraging to me to be reading his words, his biography, and he'll say, you know, now I have often been accused of being too negative, right? And so a lot of the things that we've experienced then as well. But here is an example of how, as it was in Corinth, the gospel today is being distorted and then being emptied of its power. So listen to this now. Simple, straightforward words of our Lord, Matthew 7. Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide, and the way is easy that leads to destruction. And those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow, and the way is hard that leads to life. And those who find it are few. Talk about capsulized, powerful contrasting of the narrow way and of Broadway. Just stare at that passage. Do that this week. Just stare at that passage and think about it. Many, few, wide, narrow. Easy. Hard. Those are powerful contrasts. And so when we see, as I mentioned earlier, oh, hundreds of people heard this speaker at this event and they became Christians, they got saved, they chose to follow Christ. Well, I have to be skeptical of reports like that. Have there been times in church history of remarkable revivals where God has worked. I mean, we saw one and see one in Acts 2 and so forth. But even then, back in the days of George Whitefield and so on, and the Great Awakening, and Jonathan Edwards, and all this thing, none of those men, after they preached, even though there seemed to be a powerful response in the large crowds that were there, None of them ever said hundreds got saved. And there were some promising signs of God's work then among them. These kinds of things are almost always the product of a false gospel due to a message of the cross being emptied of its power because it's been tweaked and altered. Now, how is the gospel in our day usually altered? How is it usually changed slightly, almost imperceptibly, so that it suddenly becomes acceptable then to man? Well, the typical alteration is that of minimizing man's sin, minimal talk about the wrath of God, minimal, if any, talking about man's being totally incapable of making himself acceptable to God. In other words, this false gospel, it raises man up and it pulls God down. But in light of what Jesus says in Matthew 7 there, and that powerful punchline at the end, and few are they who find it, then I just suggest this question. How can these mega churches that we see all around us, how can that be? How is that squared with what Jesus says? And few are they who find it. What, in fact, we see, what are those things more consistent with? Are they consistent with the narrow way? No, they're consistent with Broadway. Many are those who travel then upon it. The gate is wide. It's easy. Many people go that way. And it ends then in hell. The gate is narrow. And the way is hard that leads to life. And those who find it are few. So don't rush by those words. Think of them and think of their implications. The Corinthians, in some way, they were toying with Broadway. They were thinking and acting like the world. So that in our day, and it's really the same kind of error, but in our day it seems like so many churches, because they're like, look at We gotta make something happen. Something's gonna happen here, we gotta make it happen. Let's get this thing going here. Let's get some spotlights on. We gotta do something, you see, rather than saying, you know what? Salvation is of the Lord. What we're called to do is faithfully preach and live the word of the cross. And the rest is up to the Lord. Look at, Paul says, right? We're gonna hear him say this in 1 Corinthians. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gives the increase. Now you've got to plant good seed. You've got to plant the gospel. And if you're going to water, you've got to keep preaching the gospel. But in the end, think of a seed. A seed in itself should, it contains enough evidence that God exists and that he's our creator, just in that seed. Because if you think about that seed, here's this thing. It's dead. Instead, take a kernel of wheat. It's dead. And yeah, and you put it in the ground. So you can do something. You can plant it. And you can water it. But how do you make it live? That's God. That's God doing that. You see, I planted. And that's how the gospel is. We can plant. We can water, but God has to give the increase. Otherwise, all we're growing is weeds then, you see. So it seems like churches that give into this kind of a thing, and individual Christians, and we have to guard against it. I gotta make something happen. Here's what we gotta do. We have to advertise, and we have to let people know that if you come here on Sunday, we can be just like Ed Sullivan Show. We've got a really big show for, you know, he would say, I can't even say it, it's like shoe show or something like that. You know, we've got a really big show for you. Come on down. And a lot of times I know, and it may sound to you like I exaggerate, but inevitably I know we're kind of isolated and sheltered here. But if you went out and you visited these churches around like this, that's the very thing that you're going to see. It's counterfeit. Everything's out of square, you see. Church signs, if they were really going to be truthful, and I suppose some of them are, you know. We're the Church of the Broadway. It's easy here. Come on in. Big things, then, are happening. What was the response to Jesus' preaching? Jesus was probably a pretty good preacher, don't you think? Could pretty well count on what Jesus preached was true. What happened when he preached? John 6, and he said, this is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it's granted him by the Father. After this, Many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So again, how is it that we can claim, some speaker, preacher can claim, hundreds, look at me, hundreds, oh, you're better than Jesus, huh? The danger of all of that is that all you're doing is filling churches with counterfeit Christians. We don't know what the specifics were, of how the Corinthians were altering the gospel. We do know they were doing it to make it acceptable then to the natural man. When the gospel's tweaked, it's always tweaked in ways like this. It will allow for man to contribute toward his salvation in some way. It will minimize the terrible wickedness of man's sin. It will minimize the holiness and the wrath of God. against the sinner, you see, in order, and what happens? The word of the cross is emptied of its power. Let me show you one more thing. We're only on page eight, and we got 14 pages. But at the last part of your handout, on the last page or so, I put two additional great quotations from Lloyd-Jones that relate to this specific subject. So be sure and read those later, and you'll see then that I mean. But let's close with emphasizing this. The good news, and I pointed this out in our midweek study in Romans this last week, the good news always begins with bad news. The word of the cross, that is the gospel, always begins with the truth of man's sin, of his hopeless and helpless condition before the holy, holy, holy God. Any so-called gospel that does not begin here is a false gospel. It's emptied of God's power and it's unable to save anyone. Now, I can prove this from scripture, and it's rather easy to prove. Most of you are familiar with Romans, right? Romans, and I won't read the whole thing here, I put the excerpts in your handout here. The theme, what is the theme of Romans? What is it? It's the gospel. I'm not ashamed of the gospel. It's the power of God to salvation. And Paul will talk about, you know, therefore by the works of the law will no man be justified. That we're justified by faith alone in Christ alone. That's the gospel, the good news is the subject, it's the topic of Romans, right? How does Romans begin? How does it begin? It begins this way, in chapters one, Chapter 2, and at least halfway into Chapter 3, Paul is hammering, hammering the sinner and his sin and the fact that he's under the wrath of God. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. God has handed them over. They don't acknowledge God. They don't thank God as creator. And so he's handed them over. Here they are in their sin. And then in chapter two, it's like he comes along and he says, oh, Mr. Jew, you think you're pretty righteous. You're all happy that I've been talking about those wicked, detestable Gentiles. Do you think that God The holy God is going to wink at your sin when you're doing the very same thing. And so he just follows that theme right on down through chapter 2 and winds up the chapter saying, you know, I'll tell you what a true Israelite is. I'll tell you what a true Israelite is. And you guys aren't true Israelites. A true Israelite is somebody that's been circumcised of heart, you see. The gospel is really not about the letter, but it's about the spirit. You must be born again. That's what he's talking about. And then the crescendo just increases as he comes into chapter 3, especially verses 9 through 20. There is none righteous, not even one. There is none who does good. All of them have become useless. The poison of asps is under their lips, you see. Their feet are swift to shed blood. There is no fear of God before their eyes. He's preaching the gospel when he does that. You have to begin with man's sin, else you have just tweaked the gospel. And that's what's happening today. What's happening is, Those things are being just skimmed over. And what people are being told is, just tell us about how God loves us, how God is a God of love. You see, that's what we want to hear. We want to be made to feel good and that we're OK, you see. Well, that's interesting. Because Paul's intent, inspired by the Holy Spirit, as he begins preaching the gospel is anything but trying to make them comfortable. That's not what it's about, you see. In one of those other quotes, I think, did I read it in Sunday school this morning? From Lloyd-Jones, he mentioned that he's sometimes accused of scaring people, frightening people. People come to church and they're just all in turmoil inside because of what he is preaching, and he said, I'm not afraid of those accusations, because I'll tell you what, I am trying to scare you. You see, if you won't listen to the beauty of the goth, the beauty of Christ, then I'm going to, I want to scare you, to frighten you by showing you the horrors of hell. Unless a person, I mean, this part should be a no-brainer. If I have no need of a savior, Why would I care about a Savior, right? If I've not truly seen that I'm dead in my sin, that this is an impossible situation that I'm in. I haven't seen that. Why do I need Christ, you see? I'm OK. We're all OK. Here's another quote I'll read to you right along these same lines. Many people, oh yeah, here it is. Many people often say that about my preaching, Lloyd-Jones says. Too hard, they say. Too harsh. It's unpleasant. Let me listen to somebody who's always talking about love and about the love of God. Ah, how smooth his tongue is. If you believe that, which is no gospel, which is always praising you and praising your world, calling it a beautiful world and saying that man is wonderful and that all is well, if you believe that, you really see no need for the blood of Christ. And that message will inject into you this poison that will damn your soul and send you to hell. False teaching that sends people to sleep and gives them that false exhilaration finally ruins and destroys the soul. Let me put it plainly. If you do not accept this, and what he's talking about is specifically those first two and a half chapters of Romans, right? If you do not accept this, And if you do not accept this description of yourself apart from the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, then there's no need to argue about it. You are just not a Christian. If you resent all this, this business, there's none righteous, not even one, right? If you resent all this, you're not a Christian. You're not yet convinced and convicted of sin, and you're not a believer in Christ, though you may think that you are. If you in any way object to this, you are automatically putting yourself outside the kingdom of God and the Christian faith, you see. And so there it is. What would happen, for example, what would happen if in most churches today, Not even just the megachurches, but so many others, right? If a preacher came and presented accurately the gospel by starting at Romans chapter one and going verse by verse on through showing the sin and the desperate position of man in his sin. Coming up to that great crescendo, there's none righteous, not even one. All have turned aside. They've become useless, rotten, stinking before God, unable to, dead in their sin, walking according to the God of this world. What would happen? can tell you what had happened. The fangs will come out because the places are filled with people who think that they're saved and they're not. And when they start to hear this, they don't like it. This turmoil starts in them. Well, guess what? Until that turmoil starts, which is created by God's word and his spirit, A person is still over here on Broadway. What's it going to take? What does it take? Somebody's on Broadway. They're headed for hell. It leads to destruction. It's easy. And they've got lots of company. It must be the right way because there's all kinds of people on it. That's got to be wrong over there because what kind of a fool would take that way? And there's hardly any people over there. This is the way that we're going to go. What's it going to take to get somebody that's on Broadway to stop Turn around, go back to the beginning, and get over here on the narrow way. It's going to take the power of God. It's going to take God grabbing hold of them and turning them around. And if you're a Christian, that's exactly what happened to you. We didn't seek him. He sought us while we were still his enemies. And he grabbed us and he saved us. The beauty of the gospel is, that once a person comes to the conviction of their sin, then we see there is a way. There is a way that you can follow and walk. And it's tough going. It's going to be costly. But it doesn't end in the lake of fire. It ends at the celestial city in the presence of the Lord. Father, we thank you for these truths from your word. We pray that they would by your spirit, sink deeply into our minds and our hearts. And I pray that if there be anyone listening today that's still dead in trespasses and sins, deceived about being saved when they're not, I pray, Father, that you would open up their eyes to show them their sin and their need of Christ, that they might be saved, born again, and come to truly know you. And we pray this all in Christ's name, amen.