I now think there are more people out there suffering under the damage of Gospel-less teachings than we can imagine, many still attending church and many not. The people for whom Dr. Rosenbladt wrote his presentation have consistently come away after listening to it in pure amazement. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been hearing, “Well, if church had been more like that, I would probably have stayed.” And that’s exactly the point.

Too often these people don’t say anything to anyone, or maybe only say something to their close friends which even then belies the true depth of their despair. They sit in church dutifully and say nothing. Or they finally stop attending, and still say nothing. They don’t know what to say or to whom they should go, or they’ve simply given up as failures.

So we’re just going to keep banging the drum and trying to help get the sound of the Gospel in people’s ears. This is why we’re so happy to finally be able to offer this presentation for free and why we’re asking everyone to help share it everywhere and in any way they can think of.

You know, burn the MP3 to CDs and hand them out! The need is great. These people need the salve of the healing Gospel as soon as possible.

And you’ve nailed it, everything else in this earthly life screams merit and reward for this or that effort. It’s the underlying “lingo”, if you will, of everything we do and its exhausting (and that’s coming from someone who would be classified as a workaholic and not a slacker, my wife would confirm this). Yet it is utterly exhausting. The ONLY message in the ENTIRE world that sounds different is “Christ did this for me”.

As a similar note my same buddy and I in our more reformed days use to get bent around the axle as to how to “offer the gospel to someone”. Because you always wanted to, as he put it, “somehow close the deal”, i.e. know they did something to “accept it” and thus “be saved”. So you’d loose how to simply give the real gospel to anyone in a morass of hoops to jump through and offer for salvation (though you didn’t formerly mean them to be “works”). Then finally it donned on us one day, we asked ourselves, “Can you ever feel comfortable and not in danger of denying the real faith by saying, not to a general unknown person, but a particular person right in front of you, ‘Bob Christ didn’t die for you unless you do (fill in the blank, up to and including faith itself)’”.

But my own literal in a flash of the eye conversion from agnostic/atheist to Christian was based not really upon the Law but on a pure proclamation of Christ and Him crucified for me. That’s what broke me literally in a single moment when He cried out, “My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me”, drinking the dregs of wrath to the bitter last drop for me. It stunned me for the first time something like this, “So THAT is what God is like”. It was literally waking up to a reality that you never saw before and realizing the reality/paradigm you were living under was false.

When I talk to ex-RC, ex-baptist, ex-whatevers who once were in the church but left and are now somewhere between agnostic atheist they are always stunned to hear that Christ was actually crucified for the forgiveness of sin, for them, and that THAT is the Christian faith as opposed to some form of “progress” morally or otherwise. They may not suddenly “become Christians” or “return” to the church they grew up in, but it’s a stunning news they’ve not heard before.

I have loved this lecture for so long, and I am so thankful that you have made it free so that I can freely share it with people I know who really need to hear the beauty of the Gospel.

Grace and peace to you!