The Gospel Message – Part 2

This is Anne Graham Lottes. Here's Anne. I read my Bible and heard God speaking to me through it and a couple of years later I came back after that first year.

Mother let me go to the public high school right here in Swannanoa Valley and I loved it. But I remember a couple of years later in the same bedroom where I knelt down to receive Christ as Savior, I knelt down and gave my life to God for service because I'd always thought, you know, when I stood before God, I'd tell him who my daddy was and he'd just be so proud. Somehow I could just coast in on daddy's coattails and mother and my grandparents. But it occurred to me that when I stand before God, I'll give an account to God for my life and the way I've lived it. And I hadn't done anything for him.

So I knelt down in my bedroom, I was about 16 years of age, I can't remember anything that triggered it, just that thought. And told him I wanted my life to count. I wanted to give him my life for whatever he wanted to use it for. I just wanted to have something to show for the way I lived my life on earth. And I believe God accepted that prayer. But I learned it in the home.

And where have you learned it? Where did you step out from behind your parents' faith? I think sometimes when we see our children, they go off to the university or they go off to school and they lose their faith, was it because it never was theirs? They never developed that personal one-on-one, they just coasted in on their parents' coattails and when they get off to school and they're challenged, then they don't know how to pray, they don't know how to get answers to prayer, they don't know how to read God's word, to hear him speak, so their relationship with him is not personal, it's not strong.

They're not convinced of the truth of the gospel, so they don't have the courage to stand by their convictions when they're challenged in some classroom and they don't live it out. So it's important to make sure that we have received that baton of the gospel for ourselves. And we're passing it on to the next generation where they receive it for themselves. And I believe it's learned, one of the places, it's learned in the home.

You can start one, right? So never mind what went before, but just from this generation forward, you establish that in your home. So you create an atmosphere of worship of God where your children and grandchildren can come and learn about God firsthand from you. One of the ways we've done it in our family, I was thinking about this earlier, maybe I'll show you a picture tomorrow, but anyway, in the 1700s, this man put together a little volume called Daily Light. And it's just scripture morning and evening, but my grandmother gave my mother a copy of it when my mother was 10 years old living in China. And then when I turned 10, my mother gave me a copy just when I was living right across the valley. And when my children were 10, I gave each one of them their copies. And now my grandchildren, I've given them copies of the Daily Light so that we're all on the same page. We read it as a family, and it's fun because I can call one of my children and say, Did you read the Daily Light this morning? And this verse spoke to me. And one of them might say, Well, that spoke to me, but did you see this one? And so we're just sharing God's word and worshipping God together.

And it's just a sweet way of passing that baton on from generation to generation. Enosh was somebody who worshipped God, who's been impacted by the example you've set of worshipping God, in spirit and in truth. There's a story of a young person who was going off to college his first year, and he went to say goodbye to his pastor, and his pastor was just congratulating him on his new life and what he was going to be experiencing. And then the pastor said, Make sure when you go off to the university that you find a good church, and you need to get into a good church first thing. And the young person said, Yes, I'll do that, of course, you know. So the young person went off, and after the first semester he came back at Christmas, and he went by to see the old pastor, and the old pastor was just asking how classes were going, and then he said, And did you find a good church? And the college student was sort of shuffling his feet and looking down, and then the old pastor said, You are going to church, aren't you? And the young person said, Well, you know, he said, No, not really. He said, I got there, and there's just not time. You know, I have lots of activities.

I have to study hard. There are many things to do, and you know, I just don't think I need church right now, and I know I'm saved, but no, I'm not going to church. And so the pastor, they were sitting beside the hearth, and the fire was burning, and the pastor got up, and he just rearranged the logs, and he took the logs off. He left one log on the fire, but the others he removed, and then he just sat there, and he just stared at the fire, and he kept staring at it, and finally the young person thought, Well, he's gone to sleep, and so he cleared his voice, and the pastor said, Did you think I dozed off? And he said, No. He said, I didn't doze off. He said, I was just looking at that log.

He said, Look at it. He said, You remember it was burning brightly when all the logs were there, but when you removed the other logs from the fire, then the one log left, the fire went out. If you want to keep the fire burning in your heart, if you want to keep your fire of love for Jesus and your fire of love for the gospel and keep on the sharp edge of your commitment, you need other logs, and I think that's corporate worship. So it says that other people began calling on the name of the Lord.

Enosh set the example, but other people followed his example, and they were worshiping the Lord, and I think that's corporate worship. So are you in church? Do you go to church? Sometimes it's hard for me.

I'm going to be honest. I've been in a lot of churches, but I go to church, and I'm a member of a church, and find a church that preaches God's word. Find a church that loves the gospel. Find a church that has a good youth program for your kids, and a good youth program is not one where they have fun and games and they attract a lot of kids. A good youth program is where they teach them the scriptures. They take them on missions trips. They take them on service projects so they can help other people in the community, and they put feet to their faith. Get them in a good youth program, and it may be your church doesn't offer that, but maybe somebody else's church, you can put your young people in that youth program.

Churches will do that, and we need to have corporate worship if we're going to keep the fire burning. So Enosh was one who worshiped God, and he received that baton of the gospel, and then he passed it to Canaan. Canaan passed it to Mahalalel. Mahalalel passed it to Jared, and Jared passed it to Enoch.

So let's get this straight. There's Enosh, and there's Enoch. Okay, so now we're on Enoch. Down in verse 18, when Jared had lived 162 years, he became the father of Enoch. Verse 21, when Enoch had lived 65 years, he became the father of Methuselah. After he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years, and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Enoch lived 365 years. Enoch walked with God, then he was no more, because God took him away.

Whoa! That's a little insight there in the middle of that genealogy, isn't it? So here is Enoch. He has received that baton of the gospel, and when it triggered for him, when it became real in his life, it's when he had a baby. And he's looking at that little baby, and you can see the little lashes on his little chubby cheeks, and his little hands clutching his hand, and little rosebud mouth sort of twitching. Enoch is overwhelmed with the responsibility of being a parent. How am I going to raise a godly boy in this kind of civilization?

Oh, I need God. And that's when Enoch began to walk with God. And walking implies progression, doesn't it? One step at a time. When I'm home, I like to walk with a friend. Sometimes I walk by myself, but I love to walk with a friend. It makes it go faster, and we walk about two and a half or three miles, and we have two rules, so we don't walk together. One is that we have to walk at the same pace.

Other is that we have to walk in the same direction, and we don't walk together. And when you walk with God, walking with God is the same thing. You walk at God's pace, which is moment by moment obedience to his word, and how can you obey him if you're not reading it?

You have to read it every day, so that you're following through and living out your commitment to the word of God. But you do that step by step, day by day, and then you walk in God's direction. You don't go off in your own direction. You surrender the will of your life to him so you don't have your plans, you don't have your goals, you don't have your ambitions. You just give all of that to God.

And you say, God, I want what you want more than what I want. I surrender my life to you. Your will is mine. Your goals are mine.

Your priorities are mine. And you walk with God. That was Enoch, every day, making time to listen to God's voice, to surrender his life to him, to walk step by step by step, 365 days a year for 300 years, until God became so real in his life that he just walked right into the presence of God, where he still is today. Only two men in the Old Testament who did not die, Enoch and Elijah. Some were in heaven today.

One day we're going to see them. But the Bible tells us, heads up, there will be a generation, an entire generation of believers who will not die. But the trumpet will blow, and Jesus will call us, and we're going to be caught up in the air to be with Jesus and live with him forever. And I think it's very important that you and I be walking faithfully when that moment happens, and I believe it could be any moment.

All right, that's a whole other subject. But you can get the CDs, videos, audios from our last seminar, when we did a prophecy seminar, but I'll tell you what, we came out of there just looking up, because I believe that may be any moment. Enoch walked with God until God took him right into his presence. So as you receive that baton of the gospel, you make the commitment to worship God and set that example, to walk with God, and thirdly, to work for God. And Enoch passed the baton to his son Methuselah. I can't imagine naming my child Methuselah, but anyway. And Methuselah passed the Lamech and Lamech to Noah. And I want to talk just a moment about Noah, but let's touch on Lamech first, because Lamech must have known he was living in the last days. He knew he was living in a civilization that was provoking the judgment of God. And so when Noah was born, Lamech says something that's sort of obscure.

In verse 29, he says, When Lamech had lived 182 years, he had a son. He named him Noah and said, He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hand, caused by the ground the Lord has cursed. And so I'm going to read into it, because I think it's a little obscure, but I believe he believed judgment was coming, God was going to intervene in the lifetime of his son, and in some way his son was going to be a comfort to him.

And he found peace in that, knowing that his son was going to be part of God's plan and purpose for God's people in the midst of this terrible civilization. So Lamech gives me the impression of someone who prayed for his son before he was born, and when he was born, and when he was growing up. When do you pray for your children? When do you pray for your grandchildren? When do you pray for your nieces and nephews and somebody else's children and God's brought across your path? When do you pray for the next generation? Pray for the ones who have hoodies and pierced everything, and iPods and EarPods and iPads and all the rest of it.

They're just so lost. When do you pray for them? Lamech prayed for Noah. And I'll look back, I prayed for my children before they were conceived and every day of my pregnancy and when they were born and every day of their lives, but I'm going to tell you, it hasn't always been easy. And I look back and I see my children now suffering some of the consequences of the fact that I don't think I prayed enough, I don't think I was strong enough. Prayer is one of the hardest disciplines to learn, isn't it?

And it's a fight for me. And I've learned a lot about prayer, and I believe I'm growing in prayer, but I believe my weakness in prayer when my children were growing up has cost them, and God in his mercy and grace has overruled in so many ways. But I've apologized to all three of my children and their spouses because I feel like I've let them down in some way. So I'm just challenging you, I'm telling you that, and I won't be specific because I don't want to tell something that involves their lives, but I will just challenge you.

Don't make my mistake. You start praying for your children now, every day, and your grandchildren. I've gotten so that I start praying for my grandchildren before anything else. I just want to give them my best attention in prayer, make up for the lack of prayer that I gave my own children when they were younger. Lamech prayed for his child.

Aren't we glad? Because Noah grew up, and he became the tenth man on this list. He received the baton of truth, and you see that in chapter 6, verse 8. Noah, Lamech's son, found favor in the eyes of the Lord. This is the account of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and Noah walked with God. So right there it tells us that Noah was a man who worshiped God. When it says that he was a righteous man, he was right with God in a relationship.

You know he came through a blood sacrifice, blameless among the people, doing everything he could to be right with others, walking with God. So Noah was somebody who worshiped and who walked, and then he worked. And it was as Noah was walking with God that God impressed on Noah's heart what was on God's heart. And he said, Noah, I am sick of this.

You know, these are my paraphrase, but I'm grieved that I've made man. The whole world is wicked, evil, blasphemous, profane, and I'm going to wipe them off the face of the earth. Judgment is on my mind, Noah. And Noah was walking with God, and that's what God imparted to him, that God was going to judge the whole world. And then God said, Noah, judgment's on my mind, but salvation from judgment is also on my mind. So I want you to build an ark, and I want you to offer it to the people of your day, that anybody who comes into the ark can be saved from the judgment that's coming. And Noah did exactly what he was told. Chapter 6, verse 22, it says that he did everything just as God commanded him, and he built the ark. So you talk about being convinced of the truth of the gospel and having the courage to do it in front of the whole world, laughing at this crazy old man. I mean, they had never seen rain at that point, never seen a big body of water, never seen a boat, never even seen a building this size, certainly never seen that many animals. This man was crazy.

This was a big show. And they would come and laugh at him in the New Testament and say that Noah was a preacher of righteousness. So I imagine him standing in the door of the ark and just preaching, judgment is coming, come into the ark, you can be saved from judgment.

And the whole world's saying, no thank you, we think you're crazy. And laughing, and Noah working for God. And it just seemed to make no impact, except on his family. And Noah's family, all of his family, came into the ark. And God shut the door. And the judgment that everybody said wasn't coming came. And everybody outside of that ark was destroyed.

There's no safety in numbers. So listen to me. I walk with God too.

Not as closely as I would like, but I walk with him every day. And I can tell you, those two things are still on the heart of God. Judgment is on the heart of God, and I know it. He would be less than himself if he didn't judge this wicked, profane, blasphemous, obscene world in which we're living. God is just and he is righteous, but he's also patient, isn't he? He's not willing for any to perish, he wants all to come to repentance, and so he's withholding his judgment, but I can feel it coming.

I know judgment is coming. But I know also that salvation from judgment is on his mind. God has provided an ark, and his name is Jesus. He has one way into salvation from judgment, one way you can be saved, one door into the ark.

Did you know that? One way into salvation, and it's through the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross is the door into the ark, the place of safety from God's judgment. And you come to God through the cross of Jesus Christ, you're saved from the judgment that is coming. It doesn't mean that living in America we might not go through some bad things and if the world come under judgment and we go through economic collapse or some of the other things that are happening, the rain falls on the just and unjust, but when you step into eternity, it's appointed unto man once to die and then the judgment. If you step into eternity and you're not safely inside the ark, you're not safely under the blood of Jesus, you haven't claimed Christ as your savior, you're going to come under the judgment. There will be judgment for sin, that's the message of the cross. The message of the cross is there is judgment for sin, but also salvation, because God so loved you, he took the judgment that should have been yours and should have been mine and he took it upon himself. But make no mistake, judgment is on the mind of God and so is salvation from judgment. And you know that if you walk with God.

And you can feel it burning in his heart, knowing that time is short. And I believe, and we'll talk about this in the days to come, but that this is harvest time. And it's time to pass that baton of the gospel to the people around you. People increasingly are going to be afraid, they're looking for answers, they want hope, they want to be saved, they want to know they're going to be saved.

And you and I can tell them it's our privilege. They share with them that there is an ark, there is a place of salvation. So Noah worked for God and as a result of his work for God, you and I are here today. Had he not done that, had he said, you know God, I don't need to work for you, look at who my father is, my father is Lamek, my grandfather is Methuselah, I'm just riding on their coattails. Or he could have said, oh my goodness, I could never work like Lamek and I could never work like Methuselah and just curl up in a ball and just hide himself.

But he wasn't proud of his heritage, he wasn't overwhelmed by it, he just used it as a basis for his worship and his walking and his work. And in the process, the human race was saved. Who would be saved if you would worship God and walk with God and work for God? What work does God have for you to do?

I don't know. I don't think you're going to know until you start walking with God. It was while Noah was walking with God that God told him the work he wanted him to do. And I believe God has a work for you.

I believe that with all my heart. And it doesn't have to be standing in a pulpit doing something like this, but I believe the work that he wants you to do is to pass that baton of the gospel to somebody else. And there are all different ways to do that. And you don't have to be the one that actually prays with him to receive Christ, but you drop the seeds and you plant the seeds and somebody said there are like 80 links in that chain before somebody finally comes to Christ, but you can forge some of those links, can't you? And each one of these men had the witness of the person in front of them and set that witness for the person coming behind them.

And you and I can be an example by the way we live our lives. We're so convinced of the gospel that we have the courage to stand up for it and speak out for it in this multicultural, pluralistic, politically correct society. We speak the name of Jesus and then we live it out in commitment through our worship and through our walking and through our working until somebody out there receives the baton of the gospel and we pass it to somebody else.

Adam passed it to Seth, Seth passed it to Enosh, Enosh to Kenan, Kenan to Mahalo, Mahalo to Jared, to Enoch, to Methuselah, to Lamech, to Noah, to Shem, to Eber, to Terah, to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to Joseph, to Moses, to Joshua, to Deborah, to Gideon, to Samson, to Ruth, to Samuel, to David, to Solomon, to Josiah, to Hezekiah, to Elijah, to Esther, to Nehemiah, to Ezra, to Haggai, to Zechariah, to John the Baptist. So John the Baptist said, Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And for the first time since the Garden of Eden, we could see face to face and we saw the gospel in living flesh and John wrote, I've seen him. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God and I've seen him, I've seen God in the face of Jesus Christ, full of glory, full of truth, full of grace and Polycarp heard John's testimony and Polycarp was so convinced of the truth that he received the gospel and the courage of his convictions led him to live out his commitment until they burned him at the stake.

Isn't that interesting? First generation after the face to face relay of that baton and Abel, Abel died. First generation after Jesus, when we saw Jesus face to face, Polycarp dies and it just lays the groundwork for everything that follows.

Such a powerful witness and so Polycarp shares it with Ambrose. Ambrose to Augustine, Augustine to Anselm, Anselm to John Wycliffe, to John Huss, to Martin Luther, to John Knox, to John Calvin, to John Bunyan, to Jonathan Edwards, to John Wesley, to Whitfield, to Asbury, to Carey, to Spurgeon, to Moody, to Haldeman, to Billy Sunday, to Billy Graham, to me, to Rachel Ruth and to you. The baton of the gospel was received face to face and then relayed face to face to face to face from generation to generation to generation but it's the same gospel that God loves you.

He wants you to know him in a personal relationship. Your sin has separated you from him but you can come back to him through the blood sacrifice of the lamb whose blood was shed on the cross. The only way into that safety, the only way into a right relationship with God is through the blood of the lamb, even Jesus Christ.

But anybody can come, whosoever will may come. And when you come, your sins are forgiven. You have the hope of heaven when you die. You have a right relationship with God. You have eternal life. You have Jesus. That's the gospel. So don't bobble the baton. Don't drop it. He passed you from the beginning through all the generations.

You receive it as the treasure that it is and then you pass it on to somebody else. You've been listening to Living in the Light with Ann Graham Lotz. And if you'd like to share today's message, go to anngramlotz.org where you'll find much to assist you in getting into the Word of God, in praying, in sharing Christ with others. Join us again here next week for Living in the Light.