Thank you. So we're right in the thick of this series where we are studying the words of Jesus that we're going to hang on to, really, on the last night before it all falls apart. If you've been with us, you know, but there's an intensity to this. I want you to understand, this time tomorrow, Jesus will be dead. Everything that we read in this series, the next day, Jesus is gone. He's in a tomb. There's an intensity to this that the disciples are picking up on. Actually, they're free-falling. They're just trying to keep up. They're worried, they're wondering. Jesus keeps dropping all of these truths on them, and ever the caring shepherd, Jesus looks at them and then says these words. This is John, chapter 14. That's where we'll be today. Just the first six verses. "Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. My Father's house has many rooms. If that were not so, would I have told you that I'm going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me, that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I'm going." Thomas said, "Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?" Jesus answered, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Now, last week, if you were here, we kind of left things hanging. I said, "One of the most controversial things that Jesus ever said, we just read it." You see, I think we're going to have questions about this whole passage, and so what we want to do as we sometimes do, as we often do, is I want you to talk to each other. I want you to figure out what we need to talk about. What are you noticing there? What do you have questions about? What are you wondering about? And we do this. If you're new, if this is your first time here, we open God's Word, and we actually expect Him to speak to us. So it's okay. What I want you to do, talk to each other. What do I see? What am I wondering about? What do I have a question about? And then if you would, share with us on the app. This is the way that we're going to connect to everybody at the sites and around the country, world. Just let us know what the questions are. But here it is. Just hang out with each other. What do you see in this passage that we should talk about? Go ahead. We'll come back in just a minute. All right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to give you a little more time to send in some of those questions and thoughts into the app, and then one of our pastors is going to just shoot that to me on my phone. But we're going to do this together real-time. But to prepare for that, let's go back to something. This is years ago now, but let's revisit mondegreen. Do you all remember mondegreen? Of course, we discussed this many years ago. This is the scientific term for something that happens all the time. It's the scientific term. It's based actually on a woman who misheard something in Scotland, and she thought it said mondegreen. But what it is, it's misheard song lyrics. It happens all the time. You are driving with someone, and they are singing at the top of their lungs. "Hold me closer, Tony Danza." "Rock the Cat Boat." I mean, whatever it is. And you're going, "That's not what that lyric says." Let's go ahead and just review a few of these. Now help the person around you, because we're going to try to cover a lot of Charlie Puth, just a few years ago. "Running around, running around, running around throwing that turtle on my knee." We kind of jumped into that a little bit, so I don't know if you got a full shake of it, but that's not what he's saying. "Throw that dirt all on my name," I believe is what Charlie's saying. This is ancient. That is so what? 2016. But anyway, this next one, I think many of you will know this one. We know this song, right? "Don't go, Jason Waterfalls. We love you, Jason. We'll miss you." Okay, so here's the next one. I think just about everybody knows this one. Let's sing it together. "See that girl. Watch her scream. King of the Dancing Queen." That's not nice at all, ABBA. That is not what they're saying. Okay, next one. Swifties in the room, let's give this one a go. "Watch the lights go wide." This is pre-Travis era, okay? That's not what she's saying, okay? We got a couple more here. There's a theme now that we're running on, so just try this one, okay? Some of you old-time rockers. "We built this city." "We built this city on sausage rolls." That's not what it says. Rock and roll, right? Okay, one more. You know this one. Just sing along with it because you know this one, all right? Come on, y'all. Here we go. "Oh, I love building sausage gravy." And some of you are like, "No, that's not... He's singing 'I'm having a social graces,' not sausage gravy." Why would we spend time to talk about this? Well, first of all, I need you to know that somebody actually studied this, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, and this is what he says. He says, "You're getting an input signal that is muddled with background music, rhythms, and salivification," there you go, "making it hard for your brain to interpret everything else." That's how you get to misheard lyrics. Again, why would we talk about this? Because we're about to discuss one of the most difficult things that Jesus said, and there is so much noise around it, that if we're not careful, we're going to miss the true thing that he is saying here. You see, if it's just another song, we can laugh about it. We can goof on each other. Who cares? But if Jesus is who he says that he is, then the stakes are really high, and we need to pay attention. So the first thing we're going to do is to go back into these scriptures. I want to look and see what you guys are saying based on... Oh, here we go. What is the deal with these rooms? Why is Jesus preparing rooms? Where is he going? What are the rooms? Okay, so let's talk about that first in verses two and three. Now, the main thing I want you to hear is that there's a context where Jesus sees these guys. He's already just said, "Do not be troubled. You believe in God, believe in me." And then really what he's saying there in those first couple of verses is, "Even when everything is falling apart in the coming hours, I want you to know this is not the end. I'm going to make a way for you. I'm going to prepare a place for you." Now, this whole thing, if you want to understand it, it's a wedding metaphor. And in just a second, guys are going to struggle with it, and then about three sentences later, the gals are going to struggle with it, okay? But I need you both to remember, this is a metaphor, okay? This is a metaphor. So what are we saying? We're saying that oftentimes we will see in the New Testament, Jesus compares himself to the groom, and he compares his followers to the bride. This is where guys go, "I don't want to be the bride, man." Well, let me just help you with that. You don't have to picture yourself walking down the aisle hanging onto your dad's arm. This is a metaphor, okay? What he's talking about is how much he loves, but there's even more. You see, in the first-century culture, what would happen is two families would agree to a marriage, and these are different times, a marriage that would now take place, and one of the things they would agree upon is the marriage payment or what was sometimes called the bride price. This is where women go, "Uh-uh, not interested." I need you to know that women were not treated as property here. This is really a legal safeguard for women. Once the arrangement had been made, this secured and protected her financially. But there was an agreement that this was going to happen. These two are now officially engaged, but watch this. As soon as the engagement is sealed, the groom, the fiancé, would now go back to his father's house, often in another village, and prepare a place for them to live. Oftentimes, it was actually connected to this family compound, this complex called an insula, so he's going to build his rooms on there where they are going to live. So what Jesus is saying is, "I'm going someplace to prepare where we are going to enjoy eternity together." So there's something there. But there's also that bit about, "I'm coming back. If I go, I promise I'm coming back." You see, the groom was always coming back. The bride, her job in this moment while he's away, is to set herself apart and to be ready and prepared for the moment the groom comes back because he would announce he's returning to the village with this trumpet blast through a ram's horn, a shofar it was called, and everyone knew this is the day of the wedding. The groom has returned. A wise bride was always prepared for the return of her groom. Jesus even told a parable about be ready for the return of the groom. Are some of you putting some of the details together here? Jesus is saying, "I'm coming back. I am going away, but I promise I'm coming back." But I think the subtext in all of this as I'm reading it is that Jesus is saying, "I'm willing to pay the bride price. You're mine. I love you. I'm not leaving you on your own. But I got to go someplace now that you can't go with me." Now, these guys aren't getting it. All they're hearing is, "Wait, Jesus is leaving us." So Thomas, who is the concrete thinker in the group, and we know Thomas, but Thomas says, "We don't even know where you're going. How could we know the way?" Thomas is like, "We're going to need a roadmap, Jesus." I mean, if you're old enough to remember what those are. "We're going to need some GPS coordinates, Jesus. We don't know where you're going. We don't know the way. What are you talking about?" And Jesus looks at them and says, "No, you do know. It's me. I am the way. I'm the way to this eternity with God. I am the way to life right now. I'm the way to everything that we've been talking about. It's me. It's me. I am the way." And then he says those words in verse six, "No one comes to the Father except through me." Now, that's where everything gets stuck. That's where, and I was just peeking at some of the questions that you had. That's where some of this... I'm just going to read some of them here and let's see. "Ooh, that sounds arrogant. Is Jesus really the only way? What about Jewish people and other religions? What about my friends and family who don't know Jesus? Does this exclude people? Jesus seems too bold here." That's a huge statement. So you're telling me if you're a great person and don't believe Jesus, you go to hell? Well, that should keep us busy for a second, don't you think? Let's start with the arrogant one. You will hear more than once today me say, "I don't know." I hope we don't come across as arrogant. I hope we don't come across as, "Oh, we've got it all figured out." I'm going to appeal to scripture, and where scripture is really clear, I'm going to stand real firmly on it. But I will admit there are places that we don't know. We'll come back to the arrogance thing. Somebody said something about exclusive and intolerant, this seems intolerant if we're talking about people of other faiths. We said a little bit about this in the spring. Let's just really quickly say that when we talk about intolerance, it used to be this thing where we showed each other tolerance in this society by saying, "I'll treat you with dignity, you treat me with dignity, even if we disagree about something." Even if I think something's right or wrong and you disagree with me, we can still treat each other with dignity. That was kind of the fabric of our society. It used to be the way it is. In recent years, what has happened is that to be tolerant now means to say, "Well, there is no such a thing as right and wrong." You just can't say that because you've got your truth. Like, you've got your truth. Dude, what's right for you is right for you, what's right for me is right for me, but we can't... Right? In fact, it's absolutely wrong for you to say that there is such a thing as wrong. Think about it. What did you just say to me? There's this circularity to this thing where we go, "No, there can't be right and wrong, that's wrong." And so what do we do? We end up trying to take all of these religions because we're so tired and fatigued and sensitized to this that we just want to make them all work together. Can't we all get along? That's called religious pluralism. So we take all of the soft edges in, we pull all of our elbows in, and let's just make it all work together. I get it. I get it. There's so much conflict in this world, and there's so many ugly things that have been done in the name of so-called religion. We've even seen it this week with headlines and things, and hatred, and atrocities, and horrors. We see it, we admit it, we lament it, but I need you to know this is not the way of the one true God. The one true God, in His word, says that each person bears the image of God, so we can treat each other with dignity even if we disagree. And boy, do these religions disagree. Yes, someone said Jesus is being too bold here. This is too much. Well, He is leaving us no middle ground. Jesus is telling us how He is and what He believes. But I need you to know He's not the only one. All of these world religions exclude each other. See, some of the noise that you're hearing is, "Well, I really just have heard that all of these roads lead up the same mountain, and really they all can sort of, kind of get along if they'll just kind of lighten up a little bit." Simply not true, y'all. If you begin to study these, you will see that there's some things that they do have in common, like the golden rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." You'll see that in a variety of religions like Jainism and Hinduism, and you'll see it in Islam, certainly see it in the New Testament, and Judaism. You'll see that. But you start talking about the big questions of life, the meaning of life, what we're supposed to do in this life, man, they don't agree. When Muhammad says part of what you have to do is you've got to go to Mecca to worship the true God, and Jesus says, "Well, it doesn't matter where you worship." When Hinduism says that it's immoral to eat meat, but God tells Moses beef and chicken are okay. When some religions say men are to dominate and devalue women, but Jesus comes to elevate the value of women and to remove the barriers between genders and races and classes. When the goal of Buddhism is a snuffing out, that's what Nirvana means, of you. You're not even a you because in Buddhism you don't have a soul, but the extinction of you, that's the goal. Supposedly Buddha achieved this after 547 births. But Jesus says no, the goal, the purpose is to know God personally and to enjoy Him forever. You see how confusing it is if you try to make all of these work together? They don't want to work together. Harold Honor was one of the foremost world religion experts, a professor at Oxford University, and he said this idea of all the paths lead up the same mountain, he said it's not true. He said these religions don't want to get along. They are working at cross purposes. Here's what I'm trying to say to you. You've got to be okay with saying out loud that these don't want to get along, because that's going to lead you to a decision that you have to make. You see, it violates what we call in logic the law of non-contradiction. You want to geek out on this? Aristotle writes about this in his metaphysics. But here it is. By the way, you will talk about non-contradiction for a minute in explorations. I want to say what you heard just a minute ago. Explorations is and has been one of the most Holy Spirit-anointed classes we have had for lo these many years. If you are a longtime believer, if you are a young believer, if you are somebody who's trying to figure this out and are a skeptic, an agnostic, an atheist, you're coming from a different faith, I cannot stress enough how much that experience will help you. Like right now, your takeaway is to sign up for that class, find a friend, because we will, in safe, small ways, begin to discuss some of this. But in explo, you will hear about the law of non-contradiction. Here it is. Let's just give you the definition. It makes sense. Two statements that both contradict each other can't both be true. Now, they can both be false, they can both be wrong, but if two things contradict each other, they can't be true at the same time. Does that make sense to you? I'm not convinced. Could everybody please stand? At the sites, everybody. Everybody stand. Go ahead. I know y'all think I'm kidding. No, everybody stand. Now we're going to do this on three. I'm going to say, "One, two, three," and then you're going to do it, okay? On three. You don't get to use your phone, you don't get to use your watch. On three. Is everybody ready? What you're going to do now, here we go. Pastors at the sites, be ready. Follow me. Just a second. Here we go. On three, I want you to point to due north. Here we go. One, two, three. Point to due north. Now hold. Hold where you are. First of all, some of you are too afraid to commit. A lot of you should never be allowed to walk through the woods alone. What am I saying here? Okay, so first of all, sites, pastors, you can go ahead and use your phone, and I will just tell you due north is right there. And some of you are like, "Yes!" And some of you are like, "No." Now hang on. Stay with me. Some of you are like, "Yeah, but, you know, it's..." Dude, that's your due north. My due north is here. And I'm kind of feeling my north is here, your north is there. We don't do that, do we? No, let's just use another scenario now. What if we're all standing here together and somebody came in and said, "There is an emergency that is happening. You can call it a natural disaster, there's a flood, there's a forest fire, there's a zombie invasion." I don't care what you want to say, but here it is. The only way we're going to survive is we've got to go due north right now. Are all of you who, by the way, disagreed with each other, are you going to go, "Hey, dude, you go your way, I'll go mine. We'll meet there. We'll all get there." No, you want to know the way out, right? If there were five, six, eight people up here and they were doing what you're doing and going, "Nope, there's due north. Nope, there's due north. There's due north. There's due north," you're going to then have to start assessing, well, which one of these people has the most credibility? Because I don't want a way. I want the way. Amen? Amen. All right, now everybody sit back down, because what I want to do is to show you now a chart, and we're just going to do this real quickly, all right? There's so much more to this. I am not an expert in world religions. I have read and studied. I just want to say a couple of things to you. When you look at the world religions, they don't want to get along. This isn't even all of them. But part of what you will see is even the nature of God, they disagree about the nature of God. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, which all trace themselves back to the Hebrew scriptures, all trace themselves back to Abraham. They all say that there is a personal god. Now, even there, there's a difference. Christianity says this personal God knows the number of hairs on your head. 1 John 4 says that this loving Father sent His Son. That's how much He loves you. In Islam, it's a distant spiritual being, but still a spiritual being, a person. By the time you get to Hinduism, it's an impersonal oneness with the universe, but not a person. Sometimes it will leak over into expressions of many gods or polytheism. That's Hinduism. When you begin to try to figure out, like Buddhism doesn't even believe in a creator god. The Buddha in the Pali Canon said that the gods, so-called gods, need to be taught themselves so that they can break free of things. That doesn't even sound like a god to me. When you get to the root problem of humanity and how we're supposed to solve it, I think that's where it gets really interesting. In Judaism, the solution is that you follow the teachings of Moses and all the laws and the traditions that have been layered on top of that long after the scriptures. That's Orthodox Judaism. When you get to something like Hinduism, it is you're going to break the cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation by your devotion to Brahman, this impersonal oneness of the universe. That's how you're going to work out your karmic fate. For Buddhism, it's you're going to follow the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, and you're going to, along the way, eliminate desire, and little by little, suffering will end because you will end. There will be a kind of a snuffing out of you. Islam, you follow the five pillars of Islam, which is a code of conduct, and if you do this well, the plan is that when you stand before a holy God at the end of time, your good and your bad will be weighed out. That's the image, and you hope and pray that the good outweighs the bad. We could just keep going, but I think one of the things that is so interesting here is that all of these are about what you do. All of these. Like even when you look at Mormonism, which I would say is an offshoot of Orthodox Christianity, it is not a part of Orthodox Christianity, it is what you do to earn this. It's just something that you do to somehow make things right. When you get to Sikhism, so you look at Sikhism, which is a newer development. I think when you read the Guru Granth Sahib, you will see what almost sounds like grace, but the deeper into it you go, at least from my understanding, it isn't really grace because it's a kind of thing that comes from this impersonal god only with your disciplined living. You see, what I want you to see when you look across all of these, the solution is what you do. Except for Christianity. Jesus says, "You can't accomplish this on your own. I will make a way for you. I will pay the price." Mark 10 says, "I will give my life as a ransom," we saw last week. He's the one who pays the bride price. Why? Because he's the only one who qualifies. The evidence backs him up. All of these who are standing there telling you where due north is, his life, his death, and his resurrection begins to stack up behind him. Jesus has the credibility and says, "I will make things right if you trust what I have already done for you." That's grace. We are humble enough to admit, "I can't do. I'll trust what you've done." You see, to me, that begins to separate all of this, but I want to give you one more comment about Judaism. The only other religion on here that we think is absolutely and completely true is what I would call Biblical Judaism or Hebrew monotheism, because that's what we see in the Old Testament. We read the Old Testament for all it's worth. We believe what we read in the Old Testament, but we also believe that Jesus fulfilled those prophecies and those promises and the covenant God made with Abraham. So now what we see is that there is this fulfilling. Jesus even says, "I didn't come to abolish the law. I came to make it sing. I came to fulfill it. I came to bring it to life." So we see Jesus as the fulfillment of all of this. We see him as Messiah. I want to say to those of you who come from a Jewish background, there's some history early on that we don't have time to go into, where early believers and early Jewish leaders were at odds with each other, and it became kind of the assumption that if you're going to follow this Jesus of Nazareth, then you have to abandon your cultural heritage and this beautiful story of the God who loves the children of Israel, and I'm just telling you that's not true. If you're trying to figure out who Jesus is, the Messiah, the fulfilled one, there will come a moment where we have to talk about the scriptures that begin to hint and point towards the moment when God himself will walk the planet with us. I think there's plenty to talk about. But if you turn to Jesus, I want you to know we're not asking you to abandon your cultural heritage along the way. Now, that's a really quick tour. Do you feel that? Do you guys, when you're listening to an audiobook or a podcast, do you listen at one or do you listen at 1.5, 1.7? Anybody else know what I'm talking about? I'm at least listening at 1.5 usually. I know that I just went through that at 1.5, maybe 1.7. If you've got questions, let's talk, but the real thing now is what am I supposed to do with this? Well, I would say you can examine like we do. Let us help you like we will. But for us as Christians, it always comes back to who is this Jesus? You see, if he is who he claims to be, then we need to pay attention. If he's not, this whole thing falls apart. Did anybody else see what was happening on Grok two days ago when there was a guy who, AI chatbot Grok, okay? With you with me? Okay. So, he puts this image together, and then the question was, I want to make sure that I get the prompt right. His prompt was, "Remove the fake gods from this picture." So Grok returns an edited image that shows this with this comment, "Only the real one left standing." And it lit up the internet, and it just went viral, and everybody's like, "Woohoo, go Grok, go Grok!" I want to help you with this. It did in-- You see I'm saying it, right? Grok is an it. Its intelligence is artificial. It's not an embodied soul. We've talked entire weekends about this. Grok even says on its own, "I can't choose. I'm not a person. I don't have a soul." But there were some intriguing things that it just culled the internet and began to say there is really interesting historical evidence about this Jesus who really did walk the earth and the evidence surrounding the resurrection. That's fascinating stuff, and it started great conversations. Here's my point to you. Don't let AI do the work for you. Listen to me. You were created in the image of God Almighty. You were created in the book of Ecclesiastes, it says, "Eternity was set in your heart." You have this longing, you even have a thirst for, "I wonder how this works. I want to know God. I've got things that I've got to ask." Do the work. Let us help you with that. Again, classes, conversations, we want to do that. Is this book for real? Is there evidence that backs it up? Is Jesus for real? Did the resurrection really happen? Does this make sense for my soul? These are the things that we do, but we do this as image-bearers of God Almighty. Amen? Okay, so here's the rest of it. Some of you are going, "Yeah, but man, I don't want to do that much work." And honestly, all I want to do is I just want my friends to think I'm cool, and tolerant, and open, and laid back. I was even thinking enlightened. So I was thinking of maybe getting this quote from the Buddha tattooed on my arm, or I'd like to get the symbol of the yin and yang, and I'm going to get a tattoo. I just want people to know I'm open and I'm cool. Listen to me. Before you do that, after you do that, ask yourself this question: Why would Jesus be so blunt? Some of you were asking, why was Jesus so direct about this? Do you think it's because he believes that our sin really does separate us from a holy God? Do you think that Jesus, like so many of these religions, is saying that there will be a moment of accountability? Do you think Jesus is saying, "I don't want you to face that without me"? He doesn't say he's a way. He says he's the way. He takes away all of the middle ground. But the rest of the questions, let me just get to them real quickly. I think we can cover them. A lot of them had similar themes. What about my friends who don't know Jesus? Is he really the only way? Yeah, what about people who've never heard? Oh, here's one. So if you're a great person and don't believe in Jesus, you go to hell? Really? Okay, let's talk about this for just a second. I think all of these are questions around the idea of will God be fair Scripture seems to anticipate this in Psalm 98. What we read is, "He," meaning God, "will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples with equity," with fairness. So he is going to judge the world. You will find in almost all of these religions, there's a wrong that has to be righted. We know things-- Without justice, this world has no meaning. We don't want to look the other way at all the wrongs. We want things to be set right. God will do this with fairness and righteousness. That's what we see here. But the question comes up, what about the innocent man or woman who, in some remote part of the world, who doesn't know Jesus? Well, R.C. Sproul, theologian, says that person will be just fine because God never separates from innocent people. The problem is, there is no such thing as an innocent person. You see that question about, well, what about really a great person? Well, what I want you to know is that the scriptures say that we're not going to be held accountable for how much information we have. We're going to be held accountable for how we lived our lives. Romans 1 says that there's enough evidence in creation to point to a creator. Now, some people are already off the path at that point. But there's enough evidence to show that there is an eternal God, a creator, who has made this wondrous universe. Chapter 2 says that that God has written on our hearts and kind of an internal code of conduct. It's a part of our operating system, actually. We call it our conscience. One philosopher said it's like God's inner microphone. It's that sense of right and wrong that we all eventually have to admit is there. If I were to just jump into the middle of the crowd here and find some poor unsuspecting couple and demand that the man give me his wallet because it feels good to me, it's my truth, I'm okay with it. The rest of you would say that's what? Wrong. Okay, not a trick question. I hope you're screaming at me at this height. That is wrong. If his wife is there and she stands up and we're trying to get out of here and I'm in a hurry and she's in my way and I knock her down because you just got to get out of my way, that is wrong. It's wrong. We know that deep down. If little Johnny gets a toy stolen from him, does he look at the guy who took the toy away and say, "You know what? Based on his genetic makeup, he seems to have better hand-eye coordination and because of the laws of the survival of the fittest, he probably deserves the toy more than I do." No, what's he going to do? He's going to scream bloody murder. "Mom, dad, teacher." And in his own three-year-old way, he's going to say, "That's wrong." You with me? Romans 2 says we've all got that. Romans 3 says we've all failed the test. Everybody's fallen short. That means that for things to be made right, we're going to need, biblical word, a savior. Somebody's going to have to come through for us. Somebody sets things right. If you want the full answer, I cannot say this enough. It will always come down to Jesus and the sacrifice he made for you on the cross. He has qualified himself as God in the flesh. He is the ransom. He pays the bride price. He is the sacrifice. It's Jesus that somehow satisfies God's justice. It's Jesus. Now, when we begin to look at how we make sense of this, we still have these questions, and some of them are theoretical. Some of them we get. But one of them is, so what happens to the people who don't know Jesus? How does that work? Well, Paul says something really interesting about people who are just hearing who Jesus is in a new culture, and he says that God hasn't lost track of anyone. God knows where everybody is time-wise, geographically. God knows where everyone is, and he puts them in these locations throughout history so that they'll have their best opportunity to respond to him. Here's what he says in Acts 17, "God did this so that they," these people, "would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us." And God hasn't told us how this is going to work fully. I will tell you in Acts chapter 10, you see this really interesting story of a guy named Cornelius. He doesn't know God. He doesn't have a background in the Bible. But he's beginning to reach, he's beginning to seek. God is already stirring his heart, and God goes through supernatural dramatic means to make sure that the story of Jesus gets to him. What am I saying? I'm saying based on the faithfulness of God, based on the goodness of God, we can be assured that the offer of grace through Jesus will come to all whom God knows are prepared to receive his good news. Now, how is he going to do that? I'm going to say again, I don't know. I'm going to say in some ways, he's going to be able to accomplish this in ways I can't comprehend. Some of you are going to say, "Well, that sounds like a cop-out." I can give you scores and scores of stories around the world of how things get to people around the world. But I need to tell you, it's not a cop-out. Acts 4 says there is no other name under heaven whereby we are saved. Paul says in Romans 10, "How will they call on Jesus if they haven't believed? And how will they believe if they haven't heard? And how will they hear if we don't tell them?" I want you to know around here we take this seriously. We are compelled to share the story of Jesus across the cul-de-sac, across the classroom, across the living room, across the world, because we believe Jesus is that much. And I'm going to trust God to do the rest. But you and I have been called and compelled to share. Are we telling our friends about this? When we say, "I'm struggling with that theoretical person who has never heard," are we sharing this with the people we love? This is what God has called us to. Now, one of the questions people had is, but it seems to me like I'm more likely to receive Jesus because I grew up in this culture. I want to just say this, it's really interesting. You may not know this, but I have friends around the world in large organizations. They're missionaries. They're sending missionaries to the US to tell our neighbors about Jesus. You know that, right? We are one of the great mission fields that people are coming and telling the story of Jesus to our neighbors. I just want you to know, growing up here, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to turn to Jesus. God is placing people where God places people to give them their best chance. I would just say respectfully that there are people in this culture, in this church, probably on this day, who will walk out and away from the gospel. We've been talking a little bit about this almost Christian, somebody who's just been around it enough. What I'm afraid is sometimes we grow up in this culture, and we just get numb to all the Jesus talk. We know how to go through the motions, but we've never really made it personal. Chesterton was a writer from England in the 1800s, and he said, "The best place to be is so close to your faith that you love it." He said, "The next best place, the next best thing is to be far enough away not to hate it." And then he says these words. I find them fascinating. He says, "The person worst suited to assess, to judge whether Christianity is true or not, is the one who's just close enough to think he knows more than he does. He becomes bored with it all, gradually turning into an angry agnostic." Here it is. "Already weary of hearing what he has never heard." Do you know what that means? That means for some of us, there's so much background noise that we're not even hearing what Jesus is really saying. I want you to know all of the other things that you've been told, all of the other things that have been shoved down your throat, Jesus, Jesus is saying, "I'm the way, and I've made this way for you. I want you to come home." Is there a mystery to it? Yes. But I believe God is going to be fair, scrupulously fair. I do not think we will stand before the throne of God one day with people shaking their fists saying, "This wasn't fair at all. But Greg, it still seems so unbelievably narrow." Man, do I get it. You ever in the quiet of the night had those conversations with God? Like, "Are you sure? God, is there another way?" Go back to the historical person of Jesus. He's the best and the wisest person who's ever lived. He has proven himself through that life, death, and resurrection that he can be trusted. He knows where due north is. And Jesus says, "I have to go through this for you." Jesus says, "All of these prophecies are leading to this moment. I have to make things right." And let's just even go a little bit further. Can you imagine standing before God one day? I heard somebody kind of play with this thought exercise, and I started just going down this road. Can you imagine standing before God one day and saying, "There had to have been a better way"? We're going to say that to the all-sovereign, all-knowing God? What do you think he says in return? "I sent my son. I put all of this evidence around him so that you would know I put you in the best possible position to begin to understand some things." He's the one who said he was the way. He's the one who poured out his life for you. We both experienced such a separation at that moment on the cross. What about that moment in the garden when my son begs me and says, 'Father, is there any other way?' You think I'd have let us gone through that if there wasn't another way?" Now y'all, I'm not trying to be coercive. I hope I'm not arrogant, and I'm not trying to be insensitive. I know these are big questions. I know these are tough questions. There are some clear answers, and they help us. They fit. There are some other answers that will require us praying and seeking God and looking at this together. Let's keep doing it. But I promise you, this isn't about arrogance and us saying we matter more than other people because y'all, I'll just let it out. You want to know the truth about Christianity? We are deeply flawed and profoundly loved. Amen. The only way this makes sense, why would God do this when God doesn't need anything? The only thing that makes sense to me is somehow, some way, we are the beloved. Now, I can imagine that some of you might not have liked some of what I was saying today. I was kidding in a previous service that I'll be out in the parking lot if anybody wants to-- And I guess, don't encourage that, Greg. Don't tell people to come out there and stone you. So don't do that. That's not funny. But I can understand why you'll want to talk to us. I can understand why you'll have questions. Let's keep thinking and praying and asking and going through all of this together. We want to help. I'm just going to leave you with this, and then a moment of prayer, okay? "The Silver Chair" is one of "The Chronicles of Narnia." It's one of the books that Lewis wrote. We come back to these. They're so beautifully written. They're not just for kids. It's these tales of a majestic lion who is the Christ figure in this magical land of talking animals, but there's all sorts of spiritual truths in there. In this particular book, there's a little girl named Jill who has never been to the land before, never met Aslan, makes a mess of things. She finds herself alone, desperate, and more thirsty than she has ever been in her life. Okay, so that's the setting. Let me just pick it up there. Jill came to an open glade and saw the stream. It was bright as glass running across the turf just a stone's throw away from her. But although the sight of the water made her feel ten times thirstier than before, she stood as still as if she had been turned into stone with her mouth wide open. She had a very good reason. Just on this side of the stream lay the lion. "If I run away, it'll be after me in a moment," thought Jill. "And if I go on, I shall run straight into its mouth." Anyway, she couldn't have moved if she tried, and she couldn't take her eyes off it. How long this lasted, she couldn't be sure. It seemed like hours. And the thirst became so bad that she almost felt she would not mind being eaten by the lion if only she could be sure of getting a mouthful of water first. "If you're thirsty, you may drink." For a second, she stared here and there, wondering who had spoken. Then the voice said again, "If you're thirsty, come and drink." And, of course, she remembered what her friend had said about animals talking in this world and realized it was the lion speaking, but the voice was not like a man's. It was deeper, wilder, and stronger, a sort of heavy, golden voice. It didn't make her any less frightened than she had been before, but it made her frightened in a rather different way. "Are you not thirsty?" said the lion. "I'm dying of thirst." "Then please, come and drink." "Would you mind going away while I do?" said Jill. The lion answered only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless hulk, she realized she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move. The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic. "Will you promise not to do anything to me if I do come?" "I make no promise." But Jill was now so thirsty that without noticing, she had come a step nearer. "I can't come and drink," said Jill. "Then you'll die of thirst." "Oh, dear," said Jill, coming a step closer. "I suppose I must go and look for another stream then." And then the lion said these words that Jill knew to be true as soon as she heard them. "There is no other stream." Y'all, I know it would have been easier for some if I had told you of other streams that could quench your thirst today. But there is no other stream. I know the step towards Jesus might almost seem like too much, but if you want a life with God that makes sense, if you want a life with God that is dripping with grace, if you want a life with God that has hope and joy and promise, that tells you the truth about life, that gives you purpose, there is no other way. This is the way. He is the way to that life. He is the way to eternity. He is the way through the storm that you are going through. He is the way to forgiveness. He is the way. He is the way. These aren't my words. These are his words, and they are worth hanging on to. And so what I would ask now is that you bow your head for just a minute, and then we're finished. Some of you, I would just ask you to speak with Jesus. Wow, that's a lot, isn't it? Some of you are like, "Wait, I don't even know where to start." How about this? I'll give you a few prompts, and then I'm going to get out of the way. And you can stay, you can pray, you can come find us, you can leave, you can have conversations here. Let's be cognizant of everybody else. Let's just be respectful as we leave here. Here are the prompts. For some of you, where do I even start? Jesus, who are you? Maybe the prayer is, Jesus, I know who you are, and I need you. God, I need you now. Maybe for some of you, the prayer is, Jesus, come find me. I'm so lost. And then I do believe there are some for whom the prayer is, Jesus, forgive me. Save me. Come into my life. And I know there are many of us for whom the prayer today that we pray before we leave here, before we get back out into the noise, is simply, Jesus, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.