Well, greetings. Pastor Rob asked me to give my testimony, so I'll do that. And I don't know how far back to start, but I'll start with the good part about my family and my ancestry. My mother's maiden name was Knox, and she's a descendant of the Reformers family. And in fact, my earliest American ancestors were a couple of generations of Presbyterians, devout Presbyterians, three successive generations, I think, named John Knox after the reformer. And the Presbyterian strain stayed in that part of my family for several generations until my great-grandfather. And he was, as far as I can tell, the first black sheep in the family. He ran away from home at age 14. He wanted to become a cowboy, so he went from the family home in Georgia to Oklahoma, where he got a job working on the railroad and living a fairly carnal life, I gather, and married my great-grandmother, who was a sweet woman and a Methodist. And so they became Methodists and my great-grandparents helped found one of the early Methodist churches in Oklahoma City. And on the other side, my father's side, the families were all Methodists as well. So I come from several generations of Methodists and grew up going to Sunday school in a very liberal Methodist church. By the time I was in junior high, I can vividly remember sitting in Sunday school and wondering, why am I here? Because the teacher was constantly telling us, we go through a story in the New Testament about, say, how Jesus healed the man born blind. And the Sunday school teacher would always say, now you're not supposed to take this literally. Jesus didn't really give this guy eyesight, you know, and that kind of thing. And it disturbed me that It was clear she doesn't believe the Bible. And I didn't know why we needed to be there talking about it when the NFL pregame was on TV at home. And so I made a comment to that effect and she told on me to the pastor. And so he called me during the week. I was just a junior high school kid. And he said, see, if you come to my office, I'd like to talk to you, you know. And so I went to the church and came to his office and he sat me down and said, I heard about this comment you made. And you're thinking about not coming to Sunday school anymore. And I said, well, yeah, I mean, every week we hear about how we're not supposed to take this seriously. We're not supposed to take it literally. And I don't see why we don't just stay home and watch TV. Why would we talk about something that's not true? And so he sort of deftly, like any liberal would do, tried to explain to me why it may not be strictly true, but it's important. And while we don't believe the miracles in the Bible, we believe the morality that's taught by the Bible. And I wasn't old enough or sophisticated enough to see the contradiction in that position. Because, frankly, if the Bible isn't true, if it's making claims that aren't true and pretending to be the Word of God when it's not, how could you trust its morality when so much of our morality is based on truth? And if the basis of our morality is untrue, Then why take any of it seriously? I didn't. Maybe all of that was in the back of my mind, because the more this pastor talked, the less I trusted him. But he explained to me how we should look at the miracles of the Bible. He said, for example, Jesus healed the man with the withered hand, he says the Bible claims. But he says, we're not to take that literally. He said, here's here's what I think happened. And he told me this fanciful story based on biblical texts where he said, this guy had heard Jesus say, if your right hand offends you, cut it off. And he knew not to take that literally. But he had taken his hand and bound it to his side so that he couldn't use it anymore. And Jesus forgave him of his sin and loosed his hand and said, you can use it again. And that's how he healed the guy with the withered arm. And as a junior high school kid, I thought, well, That sounds almost plausible. And so I started naming all the miracles I could think of in the Bible. And there weren't many, because I was no Bible scholar. Having gone to Sunday school in a Methodist church, up to a certain age, all you pretty much knew is color pictures. And then there are a lot of stories that aren't even necessarily Bible stories, but morality tales. And so I had very limited knowledge of the Bible. But I said, what about when Moses parted the Red Sea? And he said, you don't really believe that happened, do you? He says, water can't stand up like walls. And even if it did, the ground wouldn't be dry. You couldn't walk across it. He says, it doesn't make any sense that a miracle like that would happen. I said, well, what about Jonah in the belly of the fish? He says, no fish big enough to swallow a man. You can't believe that kind of stuff. He says, that's a symbol of resurrection. And it didn't occur to me until on the way home, after I finished talking to him, I should have asked him about the resurrection. Do you even believe Jesus rose from the dead? Because I think if he'd been honest with me, he would have had to say, no, he didn't believe that either. But I knew, even as a junior high kid, that if he admitted that to the church, even if he told the whole church what he had told me, that he doesn't believe most of these things really happened, I knew that most of the church would feel like I did. Let's just stay home and watch football then. Which is what I did. By the time I was that age, my mother had a chronic muscle disease that required a lot of hospitalization and doctor visits, so my parents were out of town a lot, and they gave me pretty much freedom to choose whether I would go to Sunday school or not. And I stopped. And it left me feeling like a pagan. Because it wasn't that I didn't believe in God. It wasn't even that I didn't believe in the Bible. It's just I didn't want to go to a church where the Bible wasn't believed. I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is the heart of the charismatic movement, the home of Oral Roberts University. And my best friend, in fact, was the son of a charismatic faith healer. And he believed the Bible and we talked about it occasionally, but the only time he ever actually tried to persuade me of anything was when he tried to get me to speak in tongues. And and I wasn't I wasn't really wanting to try that. And so I just dropped out of church for about a year and a half. And as I said, it left me feeling empty and like a pagan. The Bible wasn't believed in my church. The gospel wasn't taught. In fact, I don't remember ever hearing anyone say that I needed to be born again. I can't recall that anyone in our church ever encouraged me to think of myself as a sinner in need of divine grace, except for my mother, that is. She understood perfectly that I was a sinner in need of divine grace. She reminded me of that frequently. But the message that came through from the pulpit of our church and from my Sunday school teachers was precisely the opposite. And they were constantly telling us, you are basically good. You can choose what to make of yourself. If you try reasonably hard and reasonably well, you will go to heaven. And that's what I grew up believing. And in our church, no one ever spoke about being saved or born again. That was language you would hear other people use, but not in our church. In fact, I thought Whenever I heard someone talk about being saved, I thought that was something only derelicts and Baptists and other kinds of thoroughly debased sinners needed to do. No one ever talked about getting saved in our church. It wouldn't have even made sense to talk like that because we were constantly being taught that humanity is basically good and we all have a spark of divinity in us. And Christianity is all about letting your own intrinsic goodness overcome all the evil in the world. And so all you have to do is be the best you can be. And of course, that's a complete and total lie. But nevertheless, I grew up in that kind of church environment. And I thought I was a Christian just because I'd been born into a family that professed Christianity. And I have to say that I didn't think being a Christian was really all that important. I'd been taught to believe that anyone who was basically good and an ethical person would go to heaven, whether they were Buddhists or Mormons or whatever. And that's how I came into early adulthood, thinking that if I just didn't sin too badly, You know, and by that I meant I needed to abstain from mass murder or or anything that would have put me in prison for life. As long as I steered clear of any kind of notorious transgressions like that, God would let me in heaven when I died. And I've never read the Bible much. When I read Jesus dealings with the Pharisees, it always seemed to me that he was awfully harsh with them because they were trying to do their best, just like me. And he was always critical of them. And what I didn't realize is I was cultivating the spirit of that Pharisee who went down to the temple to pray and thank God that he was not a poor sinner like the tax collector over there. And I believe that if I could just live a better life than most other people, if I could live a conscientious life, if I could do something or anything to make the world a better place or to make myself a better person, that would be enough to earn me a place in heaven. That's what I believed, and I think that's what pretty much everybody in our church believed. And the passion of my life was politics. I started high school in August of 1968. That was the same month as the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. For those of you who are old enough to remember that era, it was a turbulent time. college violence, riots and strikes on college campuses, way worse than it is even today. The anti-war protests over Vietnam were at their peak at the time. Students on college campuses were protesting the war and protesting everything else rather than going to classes. I don't know how anybody from that generation ever earned a college degree. But that was the year. a group of radical student leaders conspired to disrupt the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and it resulted in some of the ugliest riots Chicago has ever seen. And I watched it all on television. And watching that made me begin to realize the moral bankruptcy of the politics of my generation. And so I went the other way. All my fellow students were leftists and liberals. I became very, very conservative. Two months after I started high school, Richard Nixon was elected president. I actually attended his inauguration in January of 1969 because a marching band that I played in was chosen to be in the inaugural parade. And during that trip to Washington, D.C., I saw some of the student violence up close, really close, so close that I almost got clubbed in the head by a policeman, a mounted policeman, who was chasing a group of hippies through the mall in Washington. And, you know, I heard this commotion and this massive scrum of angry hippies were running my direction with this handful of mounted policemen chasing them. and swinging their clubs like they were playing polo with the rioting hippies. And they were whacking people pretty indiscriminately. And I had to run inside one of the Smithsonian buildings to keep from getting my skull cracked. And all of this left a huge impression on my very impressionable mind, and it became really clear to me that the leftist, the radical leftist agenda was a dead-end street morally and socially and spiritually and in every way. And so I became interested in conservative politics in an era when pretty much everybody else in my generation was into rock music and rebellion and radicalism of all kinds. And I turned my back on all of that, went the opposite direction. I embraced right-wing political causes and started listening to classical music. And I was convinced that here was a way to make the world a better place through politics. And here was a way I could make myself a better person. At least I thought I'd be better than those people who were rioting and rebelling and protesting every kind of authority. And so during those years that I spent in high school, the moral decline of society became more and more obvious. The summer of 1969 featured Woodstock on the East Coast and the Manson family murders in California. And then in 1970, rock stars began dropping dead from drug overdoses. Jimi Hendrix, and he died in September of 1970, and Janis Joplin died a few weeks later. Jim Morrison died just a few months after that. And all three of them were known for, you know, living horrible lives of promiscuity and drug abuse. That's what they stood for. They were icons of the student rebellion and the radical left, and they had gained incredible fame and influence, but all of them died at a young age because of the lifestyle they lived. And it seemed to me that the thing they stood for was what killed them, drugs and sex and rock and roll. And so I see that kind of self-destruction everywhere. That was the direction my entire generation seemed to be headed. And I became more convinced than ever that the culture and the politics of my generation were all wrong. It was obvious to me, even if no one else could see it, it was obvious to me that American culture was in serious moral decline, just like many of us feel today. And I could see it then, and I was sure that the way to turn it around was by lobbying for legislation that reflected family values and conservative principles and right-wing politics. And in fact, I thought that was the only possible solution for America. I would have made a great leader in the religious right, except I wasn't all that religious, and I was about a decade ahead of the religious right. During those years in high school, As I became more and more involved in conservative political causes, I became less and less involved in the church. I was already disillusioned with the denomination I'd grown up in. And because it wasn't just the teaching in Sunday school, but they were also supporting a lot of these radical left-wing political causes. And besides that, it became obvious to me that my Sunday school teacher and the pastor didn't even believe the Bible. And so I had by then literally stopped going to church. But I still considered myself a Christian. If you had asked me, I would have said, yes, I'm a Christian. And I thought of myself as a reasonably religious person. The truth is, conservative politics had become my substitute religion. I thought of God as the ultimate political conservative, and I was convinced that he approved of me because of my political views. And I believed I had found the way that I could earn God's favor, and it was by promoting a political agenda based on moral issues. People asked me, what do you want to do? I said, I want to become a newspaper columnist. I had decided that what I wanted to do with my life was write newspaper columns of political opinions, sort of like William F. Buckley, who was my hero. And that goal began to dominate everything I did, what I read, what I watched on television, who I spent my time with. And I ought to say also that during that time, I had a handful of friends who were Christians. I lived just a few blocks away from the headquarters of Billy James Hargis. Some of you might know that name. He was a radio evangelist who was known for right-wing politics and anti-communism. And I had at least one friend whose father worked for that organization. And he shared my political views. And so we became good friends. And as I said, my best friend was the son of a Pentecostal evangelist. He was just as involved as I was in politics. And in fact, in one political organization I joined, at least half of the members were evangelical Christians. They were the same people who, within just a few years, would help found the religious right and organize all of that. And I firmly believed, at that time, that by working for conservative political causes, I thought I was doing God's will. I was absolutely convinced that if we could just elect a president like Ronald Reagan, that would save America from moral decline and spiritual decline, and so I devoted my life to that cause. America's problem was a political problem, I was convinced, and so the solution had to be a political solution. And I want to stress, I didn't know the Lord. I didn't think a lot about the Lord in those days. But not one of my evangelical friends ever bothered to share the gospel with me. We would discuss politics, and God's name often even entered into our conversations. But not one of my friends ever gave me the gospel or even asked me if I had trusted Christ as my Savior or if I even believed the Bible. I was as lost as the radicals we all hated, but my Christian friends thought that I was OK because my political views were sound. And then about a month before I graduated from high school, something happened that made me re-evaluate everything. And I remember it vividly. On the way home from school one day, I was riding with my friend whose father was the faith healer. He had a green Mustang. It was a really cool car. riding home, and we passed a friend, not a close friend, but a guy who had been friendly to us, and he happened to be a solid Christian. He was not one of my politically active friends, but he's just a guy I knew from school, a nice guy, and so my friend who was driving stopped to offer him a ride. Our friend's name was Rob Holtzinger, and I frankly didn't think he was all that bright. He was a nice guy and all of that. But he didn't understand politics, and so I usually didn't spend a whole lot of time talking to him. And we were in the midst of a political discussion when we picked him up, and so he listened for a while and then interrupted us, this political discussion, and said to me, you know, Johnson, there are a lot of things more important than politics. And I just gasped, you know, at that. I said, it was as if he had broken one of my idols, you know. I said, what do you mean? What could possibly be more important than politics? And he said, well, the gospel, for one thing, if you really want to make a difference in the world, why don't you preach the gospel? And I said, politics is the gospel. The only hope for saving this nation is for good people to get enough political clout to stop the moral decline. He said, that's not true. He said, the gospel is not about politics. It's a message about Christ and how he forgives sin and changes people's hearts. And that's the only thing that can really help our nation. People need to know Christ. And I scoffed at that and blew him off. I told him he's naive. I said, you're just talking spiritual mumbo jumbo. If we all did what you said, nothing would ever get accomplished. And I wasn't about to give a give up hardcore politics for a lot of pious-sounding, pie-in-the-sky sentimentality. But he persisted with me. He said, frankly, I don't think God cares that much about your politics. He said, you need to get your priorities straight. He said, it's going to take more than political clout to turn around our culture. He said, God's answer to the problems of sin in our society is the gospel, not a political strategy. And I said, Holtzinger, you don't even know what you're talking about. Jesus is a politician. He's going to rule the world when he comes back, right? And he said, well, sure, he's going to rule the world. I said, well, what could be more political than that? And that was the end of the discussion. He didn't have an answer for that. I figured I won the argument. Because he was quiet the rest of the way home. And my other friend and I went on talking politics. But what he said somehow stuck in my mind, and I couldn't get it out. And then later that night, something happened. I insulted my sister, made her really angry, and she went to bed early. And I was feeling guilty about that, and depressed, and a little bit melancholy, and I'm not even sure why. I don't even remember what I said to my sister, but it was something dastardly I felt really bad about. I'd been unkind to her. And plus, something about that conversation with Rob Holtzinger had stuck in my mind and left me feeling like a complete pagan. My head is telling me, you're arguing against the gospel. And so I was having a hard time getting to sleep that night. I decided to do something spiritual. I decided to read my Bible. Now, that's something I'd never really done. I owned a Bible. but never really used it. We didn't carry our Bibles to Sunday school, even in church. It was more of a decorative thing for the, you know, light stand, lamp stand next to my bed. In fact, I had one of those zipper Bibles and I kept it zipped just so it would stay in pristine condition, you know. And so I owned a Bible, but I'd never really used it. And in fact, if I ever read a Bible at all, a Bible verse, it was just a single verse or two at a time. I remember we had this little plastic thing shaped like a loaf of bread with cards in it that had Bible verses on them. And you would pull one out every day and read it, like the horoscope. And so I was literally using my Bible like a Ouija board or tarot cards or something, you know. If I ever opened my Bible, and I did this occasionally, I would just let it flop open at random and pick out a verse, and whatever verse my eyes lighted on, I would try to find some mystical message from God in whatever passage I happened to open to. And rarely did it make really good sense. The horoscope was actually better because horoscope sayings are crafted to be applicable to anybody, you know. And if you open to an Old Testament passage, and I knew enough about the Bible to know this, that if you opened to an Old Testament passage, you're likely to get a genealogy or a prophecy that makes no sense out of context. And so I never read more than a verse or two at a time, but that night I decided I'm going to read the Bible. And I didn't have any intention of doing more than I normally did. I just opened it up and flopped it open. And of course, because I knew better than to go to the Old Testament, I sort of teased it towards the New Testament and flopped it open. And that night it opened to 1 Corinthians 1. I mentioned this the other night that that passage was instrumental in my salvation. It opened right to the first page of First Corinthians. And for some reason, it occurred to me that, you know, if I could do penance and please God and make myself feel spiritual by reading a verse of the Bible, just think how spiritual I would be if I read the whole book. It occurred to me for the first time ever to read a whole book of Scripture. And I thought, this is really great because nobody reads a whole book of Scripture. And that's really what I thought. And so I decided to try to read the whole book of First Corinthians and be really spiritual. In fact, first I thumbed through it to make sure it wasn't a really long book. And when I found out how long it was, it intimidated me. But I decided I can do this. And so I started reading anyway to see how far I could get. The honest truth is, if I had read just two complete pages, that I think would have been more of the Bible than I had ever in my life read at one sitting. I think the biggest, longest passage of scripture I had ever listened to or read were the Christmas chronicles that they read every Christmas from Luke 2 and all of that, where somebody stands up and reads about the birth of Christ. I'd heard those passages, but other than that, I had never read this much of the Bible in my life. And so I started reading. And chapter one, when I got—you can open your Bibles and look at this if you want. This is not a place you'd send a 17-year-old high school student on an evangelistic quest, is it? Nobody ever would have recommended to me, well, if you're looking for salvation or trying to understand the gospel, just read 1 Corinthians. Nobody would ever say that. They'd say, read the Gospel of John. Maybe, maybe even read the book of Romans, but first Corinthians. But I started reading and when I got to verse 19, I was absolutely shocked at what it said. Look at verse 18 and follow along with me. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing. But to us who are being saved, it's the power of God. I already heard Rob Holtzinger's voice echoing my head. It's the gospel, the word of the cross. It's folly to those who are perishing. Well, that put me in that category right away. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Where's the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where's the debater of this age? That's me, by the way, the debater of this age. I loved debate. an argument? Has God not 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." And obviously when I read that, my mind went right back to what my friend Rob Holtzinger had said to me earlier that day, there are more important things in life than politics. God's answer to our society's sin problem is the gospel, not a political strategy, not legislation. And the echo of that conversation rang in my ears. I felt like I had won the argument with Rob Holtzinger, and I knew I wasn't going to win an argument with God. But what shocked me the most about this passage is the absolute contempt God has for the wisdom of this world. I always thought, you know, that if I studied the best of this world's wisdom and fought for the highest of political principles and cultivated my knowledge of the world's best philosophies and appreciated the finest things in art and music and culture, God would surely be pleased with that. But here in verse 19, God says, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Verse 20, where's the one who's wise? Where's the scribe? Where's the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? And the more I read, the more my political worldview crumbled. Because Paul is relentless here in tearing down the wisdom of this world. Look at verse 27. 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 I kept reading verses like that just jumped out at me and it was like I was getting pummeled between the eyes. Chapter 2, verse 5, your faith should not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. In verse 6, yet among the mature, we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the political leaders of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. And then the killer for me was chapter 3, verse 18. Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, he catches the wise in their craftiness. And again, the Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile. So let no one boast in men. And when I finished all of that, I knew I was in trouble. Everything in my life that I ever had hoped would be pleasing to God, he dismisses it all as mere foolishness. This devastated me. I mean, I could understand if God hated the foolish things of this world. I hated the foolish things of this world. It would have made perfect sense to me if God said, everything that is vile and unsophisticated about the world, I hate. But as I read these opening chapters of 1 Corinthians, it suddenly became very clear to me that it wasn't just the bad stuff in my life that God hated. What he hated most of all about me were the very things that I thought I could take pride in. The things that I thought were the best things about me, according to First Corinthians 318, if I wanted to be wise, I needed to become a fool for Christ's sake. And I suddenly began to feel lost and sinful and doomed. This wasn't making me feel better. It was making me feel worse. And that was the very thing God used to draw me to Christ as Savior. I kept reading that night. I remember I finished at least 12 chapters of First Corinthians. And by the time I got to chapter 12, my heart had yielded to Christ's lordship. Chapter 12 is where he's dealing with the charismatic errors in that church. And he's telling them how to discern the difference between a spirit that someone who's speaking by the spirit of Christ and someone who's speaking by the spirit of a demon. And he says, no one can call Jesus Lord except by the Holy Spirit. And I didn't understand the context or what was going on in Corinth or any of that. But I knew from that verse that God demanded me to yield to Christ as Lord. And in my heart, I did. And that was just the beginning. The very next day, I went to a bookstore at the mall. I wanted to get a translation of the Bible that I could understand better. And so I'm going to buy a Bible and walking through the mall, a guy hands me a gospel tract. It was the first time in my life anyone had ever given me a gospel track, and I took it home and read it. It was a little track that outlined the gospel with absolute clarity, with emphasis on the doctrine of justification by faith. It's a brilliant little track. And later that that afternoon, later that day, a friend of mine called and invited me to a gospel crusade. He was a he was sort of a distant friend. He wasn't a close friend. He and I played in an orchestra together. And so I knew him and we were friendly to each other. And he called me and he's stumbling around on the phone trying to say something. He said, look, I go to a church that's helping to sponsor this citywide evangelistic meeting. And he says, we're required to invite, like, two or three friends to go. And he said, I sort of thought of you. You want to go? And I think he thought of me because he saw me as an expendable friend, you know? And he knew whoever he asked was going to think he was weird and dopey and whatever. And he was literally audibly surprised when I said, yeah, I do want to go. And so I went with him and it was this massive meeting at the fairgrounds in Tulsa. I won't tell you who the preacher is because I'm not proud of his ministry, but that night he preached a message on Isaiah 53 about the atoning work of Christ. And it was a great gospel message. And I remember, I didn't even take my Bible. I didn't know enough to do that. But my friend had his Bible on his lap open, and he's looking around and not paying any attention. When the preacher starts to quote about the crucifixion from Isaiah 53, I just reached over and took the Bible off his lap and looked to see if that was really there. Because as illiterate as I was about the Bible, I knew Isaiah was in the Old Testament. And I thought, how could that be about the crucifixion? And as I read it, I thought, that's amazing. Why didn't they ever show us this in the Methodist church? And from that night until today, I have never doubted the authenticity of scripture. And all the pieces of puzzles started to fall into place for me for the first time in my life. By the end of that week, I knew very well what it meant. to be a Christian. And for the first time in my life, I understood the life-changing power of the gospel. And literally overnight, the gospel became more important to me than politics. I completely lost my passion for politics. And ever since that day, even though I still have an interest in politics, I have absolutely no enthusiasm for it. And although I still have a lot of sympathy for most conservative political ideas, I have no confidence whatsoever in the political process. I have never seen a political ideology really change anyone's life for good. And I can tell you definitively, both from my personal experience and on the authority of God's word, that this world's wisdom offers no redemption from sin. And I'm absolutely convinced that political activism offers no answer whatsoever for the spiritual problems of our society. And nowadays there are hordes of churches who are up to their ears in politics, wasting time when they could be out preaching the gospel. The only effective answer to the evils of this present age is the gospel message. And the Apostle Paul clearly says that here in 1 Corinthians 1, verse 21. In fact, I've got less than 10 minutes, but let's fill it here. Let's look at this text. 1 Corinthians 1, 21. 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. And I want you to notice three things in that verse. First, there is a worldly wisdom that can never save. Second, there's a heavenly foolishness that does save. And third, there's a divine strategy that requires us to keep worldly wisdom and the foolishness of the gospel completely separate, totally distinct. So let me talk about these just in a few minutes that I have. First, let's talk about the worldly wisdom that can never save. There's a phrase in the middle of that verse, 1 Corinthians 121, that just jumped out at me the first time I read it. The world did not know God through wisdom. It's not possible to find God through the pursuit of worldly wisdom, philosophy and politics and arts and aesthetics and every other kind of worldly wisdom. Anything you can name that falls into the category of worldly wisdom, all of it is utterly devoid of any power to transform a sinner into a saint. There's only one thing that can give a sinner a new heart, and that is spiritual regeneration, the new birth. And the instrument of the new birth is the word of God. According to 1 Peter 1, 23, we're born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable by the word of God, which lives and abides forever. And Jesus told his disciples in John 15, verse three, you are clean, meaning sanctified, cleansed from your sin through the word that I've spoken to you and only the word of God and specifically the gospel message has the power to transform people's hearts and change them. At the very core of who they are, that's the thing I think that to this day, 40 years later, stands out in my mind that I learned at my conversion. Even though the gospel seems foolish and naive to people who are steeped in the wisdom of this world, it is the power of God for salvation. And you don't have to win an apologetical argument with somebody that you're sharing the gospel with in order for the gospel to have its effect. The guy who talked to me lost that argument, Rob Holtzinger. I don't think, I don't know if he even knows to this day, because he and I never really talked after that day. But educational programs and legislative policies and political agendas, they'll never turn sinners into good people. All those things that are accomplished through politics are worldly wisdom, and they are a carnal and utterly ineffectual strategy for reforming a society that's in love with sin. But there's the heavenly foolishness that does save. Notice this statement. It pleased God through the folly of what we preach. to save those who believe. Now that can actually be taken in two ways. It might mean that although preaching seems like a foolish strategy, that's the strategy God chose. That's what the King James Version says. If you have a King James, it says, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe. That refers to preaching itself as a strategy. It's kind of indistinct in the Greek, and idiomatically and contextually, it might make more sense to interpret it the way that verse is translated. In most of the modern versions, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. In other words, it's not only the strategy of preaching that seems foolish to human wisdom, it's the message itself. We're not trying to impress people with a message that sounds philosophically sophisticated. The gospel is a message that seems foolish and naive to the unregenerate mind. It certainly seemed foolish and naive to me when Rob Holtzinger said it. But this supposed foolishness is actually the wisdom of God, which is wiser than men. And therefore, the preaching of the gospel is the most potent weapon we could ever unleash against the sins of our society. Notice what the Apostle Paul says. Verse 22, Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom. OK, now, if we follow the strategy recommended by modern church growth experts, the conventional wisdom that drives evangelicals today. What do you do? The Jews are demanding a sign and the Greeks want wisdom. You should give the Jews a sign and preach wisdom to the Greeks, right? That's the approach most people today try to follow. You want to meet people's felt needs, give people what they're asking for. And even if they don't conscientiously and deliberately abandon the gospel, Christians today will try to mold and shape the gospel so that it sounds like wisdom to people who are seeking a message with some kind of philosophical sophistication. Don't do that. Notice what Paul says. And by the way, he was the most educated man among the early apostles. He could have made the gospel sound philosophically sophisticated, but he told the Corinthians, I don't do that. Verse 23, we preach Christ crucified. A stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. Now, think about this. He says the Jews want a sign, but we give them a stumbling block. The Greeks want wisdom. We give them foolishness. Both groups get the opposite of what they're demanding. Why is this? Did Paul just want to be perverse? No, but keep reading. Verse 24. To those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. The gospel is the greatest sign of all, and it is the greatest wisdom of all to those who are called. The elect see it, even if nobody else does. It's the power of God, and that means it's more potent than any cosmic sign. And it's the wisdom of God, wise enough to make all the wisdom of this world seem like mere foolishness by comparison. But only one class of people recognize the power and the wisdom of the gospel, and it's those who are called, the elect. They're the ones who will respond to the gospel, but they will respond if they hear the gospel. How will they hear without a preacher? That's what we should be doing, proclaiming the gospel. What seems like mere foolishness to the worldly mind is actually the only thing that can reach sinners and turn their hearts to Christ, because it is the wisdom and the power of God. And verse 25, the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men. That's why the gospel is superior to any political strategy or philosophical argument when it comes to reaching people and lifting them up out of the bondage of sin. So there's a worldly wisdom that can't save. There's a heavenly foolishness that does save. Now think about the divine strategy which requires us to keep worldly wisdom and the foolishness of the gospel totally distinct, not to try to blend the two. Notice our verse. It pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. Preaching the gospel is God's chosen strategy for salvation. Verse 27, God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and he chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. That's God's strategy, and we're not permitted to modify it, even though lots of people today try to modify it. Some have even made the mistake I made before I became a Christian, thinking that maybe a better solution to America's moral decline is a political strategy. And they've thrown all their energies and resources into trying to redeem society through politics. Others think, you know, that the key to reaching people is some form of contextualization, where the preacher morphs the gospel message into something the world will like. You know, wise-sounding philosophical reasoning, or nice-sounding moral platitudes, or cool-sounding postmodern jargon, or hip-sounding music, or whatever. And all of that is a distraction from the simple truth of the gospel, and to whatever degree the preacher buries the gospel message under pragmatic methodologies like those, he actually diminishes the power of the message he's called to proclaim. Even if tactics like that draw bigger crowds, they can't possibly have the same effect as the undiluted proclamation of God's Word. Remember, the church Paul wrote these words to was messed up, polluted with worldly values and pagan ideas and carnal sinfulness. And there is only one solution to that. It's the gospel, the message of the cross. That's the truth we must believe. That's the hope we must cling to. That's the message we must proclaim, not only to our unregenerate neighbors, but also to one another. Not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the gospel is the power of God. It might seem like folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are saved, it is the power of God. Shall I close in prayer? I'm going to close in prayer. Yeah, if you want to. Just don't make them too hard. Yes, sir. Oh, yeah. All right. So that was like a month before graduation that I would say it was April 15th of that year. And tax day, I didn't think about taxes in those days, but that's when it was. Every tax day I'm reminded I've been converted so many years. And I still feel like a young convert in many ways. The first thing I did was look for a church in my neighborhood that preached the gospel. Because Tulsa is blanketed with charismatic churches, and I had been to some charismatic churches, and I really felt the gospel isn't going to be preached there. They're going to try to get me to speak in tongues and other things. I want to hear more of what I'm reading in 1 Corinthians, you know. And so I just began to visit for maybe five weeks in a row. Each week I went to a different church. And finally found one about a mile and a half from my house. It was a small independent Baptist church where the pastor actually opened the word and preached it. Now, he only preached on one thing every week, week after week after week. He was into prophecy. So he was always preaching from the book of Revelation. But I could tell he believed the Bible and he preached the gospel. He'd always tack the gospel on the end of his messages. And that first Sunday that I went there, I could tell these people believe the Bible. This would be a good place to fellowship. And I was trying to sort of sneak in and out, you know, surreptitiously, didn't really want to be noticed. But when a 17-year-old walks into a fundamentalist Baptist church, everybody notices. And so there were two exit doors, right? And the pastor went back there to shake hands with people. And I started to go out that door. And he was watching me. And he saw me go out that door. And so he intercepted me. And he welcomed me to the church and asked who I was. And so I explained to him, look, I'm a new Christian. I just came to Christ in April. And he said, the first question he asked me, are you baptized yet? He was a hardcore Baptist. And I said, no, you know, I was baptized as a baby, as a Methodist. And he said, you need to be baptized as a believer. I said, OK. He said, we're having a baptism tonight. You come and I'll baptize you. And so I did. He said, you'd be at my office at 5 o'clock. I want to hear your testimony, and then I'll baptize you in the evening service. And so I showed up at his office at 5 o'clock. And I'll never forget that conversation. It was really good. It helped me in a lot of ways. I had a few burning questions, the biggest of which was, can I lose my salvation now that I'm saved? What if I sin it away? And he explained to me, we don't believe that. He gave me a few Bible verses. reassured me that if I was genuinely saved, I would not fall away because God is the one who keeps us. And he said, look, that's a complex theological issue. It has to do with the debate between Calvinists and Armenians. I'd never heard that either. And I thought he said Armenians. And I wasn't sure why Calvinists had anything against Armenians. But I decided I'll look that up later. And in his prayer even, because he prayed for me, he prayed a line from scripture, the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. And so after he prayed, I said, does that mean if the gifts of God are without repentance, is that saying I can't lose my salvation? And he said, yeah, exactly, exactly. And he said, the Bible's full of that kind of stuff. He said, you ought to go to Bible college. And I said, I'd love to do that, but I don't know where. And so he named about 10 possible schools, none of which I'd ever heard of, except the last one he named was Moody Bible Institute. And I had heard of that. And I said, is that a good school? And he said, that's where I graduated from. And I said, that's where I'm going to go. It was like that quick. I'm a very decisive person. And so I spent my first year in college filling out the very detailed application for students at Moody Bible Institute, and they accepted me there. So, my second year in college, went to Chicago, enrolled at Moody, and when I graduated, started working for Moody Press, and you know the rest of my life.