Hi friends, my name is Keith and I’m a born again Christian, and I’d like to share the Gospel message with you. Gospel is an old Bible word that means “good news”. I want to share the Good news about how to be reconciled to God, in other words, how to be made right with God, so you can have eternal life, live forever. In other words, how you can survive death. But, first I’m going to start with a story as an illustration.
You probably saw recently, in the news, all the stories about the mudslides that happened in California. One story that really stood out to me was about this mudslide swept through a neighborhood in Montecito, near Santa Barbara. The mud and debris tore through this house where the family was in the house when it happened. The news showed the rescue workers using the jaws of life to spread the collapsed walls out of the way so they could pull a 14 year old girl out. She had been trapped in the mud in her house. They used the jaws of life to save the girls life.
In a sense you and I need to be rescued from a mudslide of God’s judgement. We need the jaws of life from heaven to free us from The jaws of death.
I know this is a touchy subject. Can we talk here? I mean, can we speak frankly? I know this is a difficult thing to talk about. I'm sure, you don't very often discuss the subject of death, even with your closest family members. You can't talk about death around the water-cooler with your co-workers. It's too sensitive. You just keep the conversation at a surface level. You don't normally talk about death with your friends. You're don’t want to offend them. You don’t talk about death with your neighbors, they'd think you were weird. Even parents probably shy away from talking about death with their kids, because it is so serious. They don’t want to scare them.
But this is something we ought to talk about. So, God brings a street preacher to you to talk about something no one else will talk to you about. God sends a street preacher to you to remind you that there is coming a day that will be your last day here on planet earth. God would try to get your attention, to wake you up to the fact of your mortality.
Death. We will all die. We all fear it. We don't want to die. We love live. Life is good! We all have a built-in fear of death. Whether young or old, big or little, juvenile or adult, none of us wants to die. We don't look forward to it. Yet, it will come for every one of us. One hundred percent of the human race will experience death sometime during their life. I'm not trying to scare you. It's just a fact. If that's disquieting to you keep listening; I’m going to turn this around; there’s hope. If it’s discomforting to you, track with me for just a little while, I’m going to share with you the solution to our greatest problem.
So we all have an appointment with death. The reason we die is because of sin. The soul that sins, it shall surely die. The wages of sin is death. Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death came through sin, so death spread to all men because all have sinned. All have sinned and fallen short of God's glory. After we die we will all have to stand before God and give an account of our lives. It is appointed to man once to die after this, then the Judgment. The standard we'll be judged by is the the standard of righteousness. That means God's going to judge the heart. God sees our hearts. He sees the secret things. The things we thought were hidden, the things we thought were done in darkness, God sees as though they were done in the light of day. Even down to every idle word spoken, every careless word. We’ll be judged by the standard of the 10 Commandments.
If we’ve looked with lust, then we’ve committed adultery in our hearts. If we’ve hated someone, the Bible says we’re murderers. If you tell one lie, you’re a liar. If you steal one thing, irrespective of its value, you’re a thief. The Bible says, ‘The eye of the Lord is in every place, beholding the evil and the good. There is nothing hid before His eyes.’ The day is coming when God will judge the world in righteousness. There is nothing hid before the eyes of Him.
It’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God. Hell awaits those who’ve transgressed that Law. Yet God was rich in mercy. He sent forth his Son, born of a woman, to die on a cross. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, being made a curse for us. He satisfied the demands of eternal justice, rose from the dead, defeated the power of the grave, and all who repent and trust in Him receive remission of sins and the gift of everlasting life.”
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