The problem with singing that song before noon is you still have over a half a day to get those eyes opened and get your antennas up, because if you really believe what you've just sung, you need to be out looking for those people that the Lord will put in your pathway. I hope you do. Again, thank you for the opportunity to to be here this week, I've enjoyed my time immensely. And as I said last night, I always gain more than I think I give. I do the best I can to give as much as I can. To come almost the whole distance of the country and the cost of the the flight, cost of the hotel and rental car and gasoline and meals and all of that. To preach three lessons, I want to make them the best three lessons that I can make them to give you something of value, and I benefited so much in my life from good preaching that I want to give back. I look over here and see a couple of Earnhardt girls, and I can remember that I was on this lectureship program some years ago with Brother Paul. And I picked up a phrase that year that he said. He said, if there were one thing that I could tell younger preachers, one piece of advice, it would be to tie the commands of God to the greatness of the God who gave those commands, so that we all could see how big this is, how great God is. It's not just a bunch of isolated do's and don'ts, but we're plugging into a huge, big God. And I've used that so many times to talk not only to younger preachers, but to parents training your children, and to others. And I picked that up at this lectureship. This can be life changing.
And I'd like to talk about the faith that saves. As I've said in previous lessons, particularly the one on Monday morning. I'm in a little bit of an unusual situation preaching in the Silicon Valley, because of all the tech companies there, it's a valley that has become kind of a magnet for engineers from all over the world. The United States of America is not producing enough tech engineers, so these companies like Google and Apple, Hewlett Packard, Facebook, they have to go and recruit from all over the world. And so everybody's in minority there. There's no majority. Everybody's in minority. And the two leading minorities very rapidly becoming Indians and Chinese. And so, as I think about the last few people that we've worked with that have become Christians. One's a young ladywhose parents are Ukrainian. Another is Spaniard from Barcelona. Another is young lady from China. Another is young man from Persia, Iran, and on and on. I could go, here's the Persian. Here's a young lady that's Hispanic. Grew up in Boston as a Catholic, then became a Pentecostal, then became an Evangelical, going to some big mega church, dissatisfied with all of it. We've done a lot of digital evangelism. She signed up a form online, came to us, got into a Bible study, walked into the church building, heard some Biblical preaching and acapella singing, and said, This is what I've been looking for all these years. I didn't know those people still existed out there in California. We work with a lot of Chinese people. On the right side of the screen is young lady named Han from Beijing. She now calls herself our Chinese daughter. She was baptized a few years ago and has become an evangelistic force. She just brings anybody and everybody who's Chinese to us, and we have to sometimes pull out Google Translate. It's almost like speaking in tongues or have her or somebody else translate. I love studying with the Chinese. I don't know, and I don't want to stereotype but, and not everyone is interested, but, there are a lot of Chinese people out there that are just curious. Want to learn more about Jesus, about the Bible, about Christianity. And Han had gone back to Beijing, then to Southern California, and was studying for an advanced accounting degree, graduate degree, and got us into an online study, Zoom call, essentially, with a couple of Chinese girls that were also in the accounting program at UC Riverside. One of them became a Christian, but we were 10 hours away so, and she had moved from Riverside to Orange County, and I referred her to some folks I know at Tustin, where I preached 16 years, and Colin Stringer, who who preaches there now. And just a couple of weeks after Yan, who is her name, became a Christian, very thick Chinese accent, Mandarin accent, she says in English, You know, our preacher, Colin, was teaching this lesson. It's brand new to the church there. Colin was preaching this lesson, teaching this lesson about Jesus washing feet. And he said that Jesus also washed Judas feet. And she said that really had an impact on me. She said, I want to be more like Jesus. I want to be a better me, because I've got this worker and fellow worker who is a thorn to me. Mistreats me all the time. And if Jesus could wash Judas feet, then I can, I can treat her better than I have. And she said, there's this new song I learned that keeps me going. And she began to sing it without a mandarin accent. On the screen. As we continue these Bible studies after she became a Christian, and she said, I sing it in the car. It reminds me about what I need to be. And she started singing when we walk with the Lord in the light of His Word. And that was new to her.
I love studying with these kinds of people. Brother Todd and I have a mutual friend, Chuck Durham, who now preaches in Arkansas, near Fayetteville. And He came out to California a few weeks ago, preached in the Miller Avenue, lectures in San Jose, and he talked about Luke about getting rid of the demons but keeping the pigs. And I said, Perfect Arkansas sermon, save our pigs. But then I took him to an acupuncturist office following Monday, and we showed him some redwood trees and did some other things, but went to an acupuncturist office, but we have a Bible study with some Chinese, and we were studying with, Daniel and Lily are their names, two acupuncturists. And we were in Luke or John four, and you don't have to be in the temple in Mount Gerizim or a temple on Mount Zion. The Lord wants people who worship in spirit and in truth, wherever they are, worldwide. And Daniel blurted out with his Mandarin accent, it's kind of like Wi Fi. You just take it wherever you go. I love studying with these people and the things that come out of their mouth. And being in Santa Clara, which is 45 miles south of San Francisco, but it does happen to be the place where a certain professional football team plays and trains once in a while. I don't know who that little shrimp is in the middle, but the guy on the left is a member of the church. He's a New Testament Christian. Brought his friend, buddy lineman to the church just a couple of weeks ago. But we study with people from all over the world, and the congregation is composed of people from about 10 languages. And we've got, again, Ukrainians, Filipinos, Chinese Indians, Europeans. We've had South Africans, Mexicans, people from all over and got an Indian elder. We've got an Indian Deacon. This Indian Deacon has a daughter just graduated from high school and got free ride scholarship offers pre med to schools all across this country, including UAB. She didn't take that one, but I was kind of encouraging her to come this way. And their son is a two time national champion of the National Bible Bee. National champion twice, and now he's 11 or 12 years old. He's competing at the senior high school level because he has nothing at the lower levels to challenge him. But this Deacon, I hope this doesn't offend you, he wears this t shirt, and I'm sorry for showing this to some of you, but I don't know what in the world he's wearing that T-shirt for in California, he grew up playing cricket. You could just see a cricket team running onto the field to the Roll Tide. You know, it just doesn't fit for some reason. But I love studying with people who are yearning to learn about the gospel, and I like to make it simple. And I make a lot of simple lists. Gospel in a nutshell can be boiled down to three simple terms, sin, grace and faith. We are lost in sin. We are saved by grace, and we access that grace by an active, obedient, total surrender in our faith.
Got a book from Melvin Curry One time, some old Bible encyclopedias. Used to be head of the Bible department at Florida College when I was a student there. And this old Bible encyclopedia had a definition of faith that has stayed with me. I love this definition. Faith is more than a mere assent to the doctrines of the gospel which leave the heart unmoved and unaffected, or assent of our sinful condition, or assent of the mind, to the method by which God justifies the ungodly but a hearty concurrence of the will and affections with this plan of salvation, which implies a renunciation of every other refuge and an actual trust in the Savior to commit the keeping of our souls into his hands in humble confidence of his ability and his willingness to save us. That's the best one paragraph definition of faith I have ever seen, and it fits what I read in the Scriptures. We'll give you a test after the sermon is over. To boil that down into simple terms, faith involves the total response of the person, conviction of mind, more than just assent. It does involve mental assent. It involves a conviction of mind, trust of heart, that leads to a surrender of the will. There's a head, heart, hands response, if you will.
Years ago, I started doing evangelism to people out on the West Coast, and had this front end lesson on Ecclesiastes that I would do, and that would be how I would bait my hook on the front end, and then I would pull them in, and then we would talk about Jesus. I alluded to that on Monday morning. And I often will go to the Gospel according to Luke, sometimes the Gospel according to John. But it dawned on me after some years that faith comes from hearing and hearing by the word of Christ, Romans, 10:17. The way that most New Testament Christians and Christians for the first few centuries, consumed the Scripture is by hearing. I grew up in a print media society. We're now in a digital media society, and a lot of people's intake comes through the eyes. But in the first century, according to the best estimates that I've read in various sources, literacy rate might have been as high as 15%, if that. Which is why revelation one three says Blessed is the one who reads in those who hear. The Roman Empire had these communal reading events. They were, that was entertainment. They read ancient works in the synagogue. They would read the Old Testament in the church. The Old Testament and the New Testament was read. But people, for the first few centuries did not necessarily own a copy, personal copy, of the scriptures. That was a luxury. And the way that the pagans viewed the Christians in the early centuries, they had a number of derogatory terms, and one of them that one pagan writer uses is the term yokel. Just a bunch of yokels, ignorant women who take their children to a cobbler, for example, so that he could teach them this religious business. But they're constantly talking about it, teaching it, and they would also be highly motivated to learn how to read, because they were a people of the book. Pagans severely underestimated the force that they were dealing with. Christians were highly motivated to learn how to read. They were highly motivated to come together and have scripture read to them.
Augustine, famous theologian, North African theologian, when Jerome had translated the Latin Vulgate in the late fourth century, Augustine wrote a letter to Jerome and said, you've translated, and there was an old Latin version, and the Latin Vulgate was the New Latin version, the latest thing based on the original Greek and Hebrew, but Augustine said that there was a one word difference in your translation of Jonah, and when they, the congregation, heard that one word that differed from the one that they'd been hearing read all these years, it caused an uproar. They knew the text so well that one word difference in translation caused a ruckus in the congregation. I don't have to tell you the value of an event such as this. Listening to brother Andy the last hour is all the advertisement you need about the value of this. I wish I knew how to recapture what this lectureship was 20 years ago, and to replicate that. What I've tried to do with folks out there, especially post covid, is to try my best to communicate there's no way that you can replicate what we get out of and what we put into assembling together as a church. You cannot fulfill "the one" another passages by turning on a computer screen. And the preaching that is, even if I were not a preacher, I have benefited so much from the brother Earnhardt's and others in of this world, and I've been a beneficiary of great preaching and that's why I want to give back so much. But it just doesn't carry the same impact when you're looking at a presentation on YouTube, then when you're there. And I hope that we can recapture some of that. We certainly need to somehow, some way. I don't know how, but the best advertisement is, realizing ourselves, what the value of good preaching can do for us and being so full of the blessings of that there's an overflow. You can't stop talking about it to others.
But faith comes from hearing, hearing by the Word of God, and whether you read it or hear it or hear it preached. It dawned on me, after going through the Gospel accounts with lost men and women, that it's evidence that produces conviction. I believe that there's evidence that God exists, that the Bible is the Word of God, that Jesus is the Son of God, and I'm convicted about that because of the evidence that points unambiguously in those directions, The Lord's track record of character produces trust. And an impeccable character, you put your trust into someone who is trustworthy, someone who is faithful and worthy of that trust, and the clear cut commands lead to surrender commands that are tied to the promises of God. If you do this, this is what I will do for you, and the connection between the commands and those promises. And it occurred to me that there are passages, for example, in the Gospel, according to Luke, that are particularly adept at building people's conviction, and other passages that are particularly helpful in building people's sense of trust and other passages that help them with the surrender issue.
Conviction. A lot of people have a low view of faith. Faith is nothing but a leap into the dark with little evidence on which it is based. That's not the case. What real faith is is something that's built on a mountain of evidence. It's not a blind leap. "Many other signs Jesus performed in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book, but these have been written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and the believing, you may have life in his name." And so evidence is presented, layers and layers of evidence, to help us build conviction, intellectual conviction in the human heart, so that we could come to those sound conclusions. But we have to weigh the evidence honestly. I talked a little bit about that on on Monday with regard to Jesus. Not everybody weighs the evidence honestly. And you have this little story about a rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16. And after they both die, the rich man sees Abraham in the distance beyond the great gulf and urges him to send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and come cool his tongue. And Abraham talks about the great chasm that makes that impossible. And then he says in verse 27, "then I beg you Father to send him to my father's house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they also come to this place of torment. But Abraham said, They have Moses and the prophets let them hear them. And he said, No father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent. And He said to them, if they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead." What this man was essentially implying is that Moses and the prophets are not enough. We need that elusive something more. We need a resurrection. And Abraham's answer is, even if you get a resurrection, you if you don't believe Moses and the prophets that won't that won't help you. I've had to struggle with that one just a bit, because I live on this side of the timeline where I have a full arsenal of tools at my disposal for evangelism and apologetics. It would be like becoming handicapped, you know, playing a game of golf and handicapping it. You know, if you eliminated the New Testament and you eliminated Jesus Christ. I mean, Jesus Christ is my main go to here. What if you had just the Old Testament? I had to think through that and really study through that. But I believe bottom line is, if all I had was the Old Testament, that would be enough. I really believe that there's enough there in the Old Testament to come to sound conclusions about all of this.
But you have to weigh the evidence honestly. You have to be open minded enough and humble minded enough to see the evidence for what it is. And we are so blessed to have not only that Old Testament, but we do have Jesus and the New Testament. And we're not dealing with a small step from the known to the unknown. Or we are rather. It's not a mountain in which we just take a blind leap. It's a mountain of evidence. "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," Hebrews 11, verse one. "For we walk by faith, not by sight," Second Corinthians Five verse seven. Faith is not a blind leap into the dark. It's a small step from a mountain of evidence into the arms of a savior. Conviction of mind, trust of heart. Going back to our definition a few minutes ago, in humble confidence of his ability and his willingness to save us. I believe the trust issue is the is the meat of the hamburger when it comes to faith. And ability and willingness are the two key issues when it comes to to building trust in people. And again, I'll show you an example of how this works when you're when you're showing lost men and women the gospel. In Luke chapter five, for example, on one occasion, verse one, "while a crowd was pressing in on him to hear the Word of God, he was standing by the lake Gennesaret, and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets, getting into one of the boats, which was Simon's. He asked him to put out a little from the land, and he sat down and taught the people from the boat. And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch, Simon said, or answered, Master, we toiled all night and took nothing but at your word, I will let down the nets. When they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. They came and filled both boats so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter sighed, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, Depart from me, for I am sinful man, oh Lord. For He and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish which they had taken. And so also were James and John sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon and Jesus said to Simon, do not be afraid. From now on, you will be catching men." Peter had become a disciple of Jesus already, but now his discipleship was about to go into overdrive. He would be asked by Jesus to quit the fishing business and to go into this full time, and in the next chapter, he becomes an apostle. Can you imagine the conversation that may have gone on in in Peter's home? I know he had had a mother in law, which implies that he had a wife, maybe some kids by this point, later on, he was an elder. First Peter five. Honey, I got great news. Jesus has asked me to join the team. Where are you going to stay? Well, foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Don't know where we're going to stay tonight or tomorrow night, or the night after that, or the night after that. How are we going to feed our family? Well, you're quitting the fishing business? How are we going to eat? So Jesus performs a miracle calculated to build Peter's faith sufficiently so that he could quit that fishing business and know that his needs will be provided for. Tthe miracle is intended to convey, don't you ever doubt me, I can put fish in your nets better than you ever dreamed. Now, Peter does get down on his knees. Says, Depart from me, Lord, I'm I'm a sinful man. But the whole point of the exercise is not to drive Peter farther away, but to pull him closer, build him, build up his faith. Did the miracle achieve its intended purpose? Verse 11 said, "when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him."
Is Jesus able to solve your greatest problems in life? Is he able to provide everything that you need? Is he able to take your corpse and to transform it into a spiritual body, to return the spirit to a glorified body and take that home with him forever and ever? I believe he's able. But is he willing with respect to you personally? That's the issue that most people I study with struggle with, and usually goes something like this. You know, I, I know God is able to do all these things, but I just, I can't bring myself to believe that he's willing with respect to me, personally. I've done some things in my life that I'm terribly ashamed of, and I am so profoundly unworthy. All of you folks, you might be worthy, but I'm not. I'm not worthy, and I just I have trouble bringing myself to believe that he would be that interested in saving me. And the beauty of Luke is the next paragraph addresses that willingness issue. "While he was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy, and he saw Jesus. When he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, saying, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean. And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, I am willing be clean. And immediately the leprosy left him." This man had heard about Jesus, and he had absolute confidence. In some ways, he had more confidence than Peter did. He, too, gets down on his knees, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean. You can do it if you're willing, if you're willing. And Jesus does the unthinkable. He approaches him and touches him. You didn't go around touching lepers in first century Palestine and he forever changes this man's life by touching him and saying, I am willing be cleansed. Leprosy gone. And what I tell people is with reference to the disease, not of the skin, but of the soul, to envision Jesus coming to you in your greatest moments of doubt, and reaching out to you and touching you personally and saying, I am willing be cleansed. He really cares about you, you know? In humble confidence of his ability and his willingness to save us. And if you really trust him, you put all your confidence in him, and you renounce every other refuge, because no one can save you like he can.
Which leads to the third and final point of surrender. There's a relationship between grace and faith, and the other preachers have alluded to that, especially Greg. But in Luke 17, you have Jesus teaching some lessons on on faith, and the apostles saying to him in verse five, increase our faith. "And the Lord said, if you had faith, like a grain of mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you." And then he shifts gears, and he says, "Will any one who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him, when he has come in from the field, come in at once and recline at table? Will not he rather say to him, prepare supper for me, dress properly, serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink. Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say we are unworthy servants or slaves. We've only done that which was our duty." This strikes the perfect balance between grace and faith, because, on the one hand, obeying the Lord does not mean we are worthy. We will never be worthy of this. Ever. Salvation is by grace. But the reception of grace and divine mercy does not mean that our duty is excluded, and that duty includes all things commanded. Which leads, naturally, to that point of surrender.
Faith is not a static commodity. There's movement to it, and the very idea of the disciples asking the Lord to increase our faith implies the non-static nature of it. Abraham's faith was completed by his works. So, faith reaches a moment of culmination, a moment of completion, what we might call a moment of surrender. That's what preachers in previous years used. L.A. Mott used to use that term, moment of surrender. Culmination point, a line of decision, a call to action. I had a discussion with a Calvinist Baptist five years ago. It's a little miniature debate. And so, I was studying, I think was on baptism. And we, I was looking at this from multiple angles in preparation for that. And one line of approach, obviously, is action verbs of Hebrews, 11. By faith Noah constructed. By faith Abraham obeyed. By faith the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, and so on. And one approach that I used in that little discussion is, what if. What if Noah had not constructed the ark? What if the people had not crossed the Red Sea? What if Naaman had not dipped seven times in the River Jordan? What if Abraham had not obeyed leaving Mesopotamia? Would their faith to save them? Faith has to get to that line of decision, that moment of surrender. And we don't get to define when that is. God does. So, when God commissions the apostle Peter to say, "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you shall receive the gift of Holy Spirit." God defines when that moment of surrender is. We don't. God does. We must pursue salvation, which makes a mess of Calvinistic theology.
Romans, chapter nine says as much in very clear language, Romans 9, 30 through 32, "What shall we say then? That the Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is a righteousness, that is by faith; but that Israel, who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness, did not succeeding in reaching that law." Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as it were, based on works. Some theologians believe lost sinners cannot pursue anything, even by faith. If so, where does that leave us? Pursue means to strive for, to aspire, to pursue. You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works. Faith without works is dead. Always has been, always will be.
Conviction, trust, surrender. There's an old story, and I hesitate to tell it because I think everyone's heard it by now, but I'll tell it again because I love to hear it. About the French Acrobat and Niagara Falls. I don't even know if it's an apocryphal story. It may have grown up to be larger than life. This French Acrobat was at Niagara Falls doing all kinds of unusual, breathtaking stunts. Including a wheelbarrow goes back to the one side, picks out a young boy. Obviously a hero in the mind of that little boy. You think I'm pretty good on this tightrope, don't you? Yes, sir. You think I could probably do just about anything? Yes, sir, I do. You think I could probably put a human being in this wheelbarrow and conduct him safely across and back on that tightrope over the Niagara gorge. Yes, sir, I do. Alright, hop in. But the boy who had expressed his mental conviction was unable to muster the personal trust to surrender totally and completely into the acrobats hands. If you want to be saved from your sin, you have to hop in.
