Our apologies for being late. If we'd been a little later, we'd all have come back as Jews. You must go and see the Museum of Judaism. Is that what it's called, Zach? Right. Zach hadn't heard of it until I told him. And we've just been to see it, and it's extremely well laid out.

Right now, somebody sitting in that corner halfway during the week said, what's the gospel? Do you remember them? Well, I'm going to answer them this morning, whether they're here or not. Let me just read a verse or two from Paul's letter to the Romans.

I am not ashamed of the gospel. Because it is the power of God for salvation of everyone who believes, first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the Gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith.

That's as good a definition of the gospel as I know, and there's a surprising omission from that definition, and I'll mention it in a moment or two. A recent poll in my country said that three-quarters of the people believed in God, but that's quite an irrelevant statistic. It would probably be 95% here, but it's not the right question, do you believe in God? The real question we need to ask today is, which God do you believe in? Because there are so many gods around now that just to believe in God means little or nothing.

And even beyond the question which God is, another far more important question, what kind of God do you believe in? I used to be a chaplain in the Royal Air Force from Britain. There were three chaplains at every Royal Air Force station. There was the C of E, Anglican, Episcopalian to you, then the Roman Catholic, the RC, and then I was the OD, other denominations, otherwise known as Oddbods.

I used to get Methodist, Presbyterian, Salvation Army, Quakers. Then I used to get Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and two particular categories were interesting, agnostic and atheist. You can register as an agnostic or an atheist in the British forces, but the OD chaplain is responsible for your soul.

So I finished up being the chaplain to the atheists. And I loved that job. I got on so well. When a new man arrived, he had to report to his chaplain. And he would sit down and I would say, now look, I'm your chaplain even though you're an atheist. And I always said three things.

Have I told you this? No. I said, oh no. All right, well. I said three things I want to say to you. First, congratulations on your faith because you've got more faith than I have. To believe that all this happened with nobody in charge and everything came out of nothing by itself, that takes a lot of faith.

It's much easier to believe that somebody did it. So I congratulated them on their faith, first of all, which was a little surprise to them. And then secondly, I said, now, if you die, or more likely are killed while I'm your chaplain, I have to bury you, and I make you a solemn promise that I will not mention God, that I will not open a Bible, that I will not pray.

I will simply say, this man is dead and gone. And I discovered that there are a lot of people who are happy to live as an atheist, but to die as one is a wee bit of a risk. And that usually opened up a nice conversation. But the third thing I said was, now sit down and tell me what kind of God you don't believe in.

And when they finished, I could always say, you've just made me an atheist too. Because I don't believe in that kind of God either. And then we had a terrific conversation after that. But somebody had told me when I was a young man, never condemn an atheist until you find out first what kind of a God he was told to believe in, because he may simply be reacting against the wrong kind of teaching.

So, there it was. So, it's terribly important to ask, what is God really like? And I just read you two verses from Romans. I wonder if I could just drop in on – we'll leave that. When you read through the Bible, there is an apparent contradiction in the answer, what kind of a God is the God of the Bible.

On the one hand, you find that he loves people. And then you read in the same Bible, he hates people. You find that he heals people and he kills them. You find that he blesses people and he curses people. And the more you read, the more there seems to be a contradiction in the Bible, or put it another way, two sides to God.

And sooner or later, you come to the conclusion that God is both a God of justice and a God of mercy, and that he acts accordingly from time to time, and that sometimes he's kind and patient and loving, and other times he seems to be just the opposite. Now, many have puzzled over this in the Bible.

Yes, I'm just a little on the top side. And some have come to the wrong conclusion. Centuries ago there was a man called Marcion who propounded the idea that the God of the Old Testament is different from the God of the New Testament.

That is a very common misunderstanding that the God of the Old is harsh and cruel and unforgiving, and the God of the New Testament is kind and patient and loving. And so he repounded the idea that Christians should cut the Old Testament out of their Bible and just stay with this nice loving father in the New Testament.

The problem was he had to then start cutting out bits of the New Testament, especially the book of Revelation, which I'm going to be teaching over the weekend.

And he felt that was somehow the God of the Old Testament creeping back in. Because there are 300 allusions to the Old Testament and the New. And it is the Old Testament God you meet in the Book of Revelation.

Because the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus are one and the same person. So, we've got to find another way to bring these two sides of God together. Islam is never sure which God is. They almost teach that God is moody. And if he gets out of bed on the wrong side in the morning, you'll meet a harsh, punishing God.

And if he's in a good mood, he'll let you off and forgive you your sins. That's another way of reconciling the two, that God is moody. Or there are those who say even that God is good and bad. And that he does some bad things sometimes and some good things at other times.

People need to face this tension and find the right way to bring them together. Now, there is a common way of speaking about God today which doesn't get the two sides together. I call it the gospel of unconditional love.

Now, how many of you have heard that phrase, unconditional love? It's as common here, I guess, as it is in my country. All over England, the churches, the pulpits are full of this unconditional love.

And if God is unconditional love, then frankly you've got to cut out a lot of the Bible. It's a phrase that you never find in Scripture. Unconditional love. But it's the little word there that I want to focus on.

If you were asked what is the most important thing about God that our world needs to know, what would you say? The majority of Christians I talk to today would say immediately, tell them God is love. And the gospel for many has become God loves you.

I was teaching about 600 Youth for the Mission workers. Do you have YWAM here? And I was teaching a number of their workers, and I was talking about something like this.

And a number came to me afterwards, especially girls, in tears. And they said, Mr. Pawson, you've robbed us of our Gospel. And their gospel, the one thing they felt they'd been called to tell the world is, God loves you.

And that was the beginning and end of their gospel. And it's become widespread these days. And I want to tell you that I don't believe that is the gospel. It's part of it. But to make it the whole gospel is really a problem.

And the problem is this word love. In English, it covers everything, and everything from sexual to sentimentality. It goes through a whole range of meanings. And if you say to an unbeliever, God loves you, unless you define what you mean by the word loves, they're going to misunderstand.

They're going to think God likes them. They're going to think that they're attractive to God. You see, the Greek language was very much better than English, and it didn't have one word love to cover a whole range of good and bad relationships.

They distinguished between kinds of love and used different words for it. For example, they had a horrible word called epithumia. We might use the English word lust for that. I call that the love of addiction, a person who is just sex-crazy and who becomes dangerous because they will take their pleasure in any way they can.

It's a horrid word. But let's move up a bit. The next word was eros, and that's the love of attraction, usually the attraction between male and female. Seventy-five percent of the pop songs ever written are about eros, the love between male and female.

And this love is based on the mutual chemistry, the attraction. I looked across a crowded room, and there I saw someone, and there I caught mine, and we were in love. That's Eros. And it's not a bad thing because God intended it. It's a good thing.

But to say God loves you... if it's going to convey a kind of sexual attraction between God and that person is very misleading. Let's move up one step from there.

The Greeks had a word, philio, I love, or philia, just love, P-H-I-L-I-A, and that was the love of affection. It was the love of liking someone. And all of us are more drawn to some people than others.

And we find it easier to be a friend of some people than others. And we draw around ourselves a circle we call our friends. That's philia. And again, it's a very good thing.

It may be between sexes or it may be between people of the same sex, but it's the love of affection. Now, we've looked at three loves so far.

The love of addiction, which is always in Scripture a bad thing. It means to be overcome by unnatural desires that govern you. Then there's eros, and I tell married couples, without eros your marriage will collapse.

If there's no physical love between you, don't expect to get right through the life. God made that. He intended that. In fact, I tell all married couples when I marry them, read the book of the Song of Songs in Scripture on the first day of your honeymoon.

Read it together. Because that's a book about eros, and it's godly. It's a good thing. So we've got the love of addiction, the love of attraction, the love of affection, and none of those words is used of God ever.

So we come to the word, and I'm sure you've heard this from many preachers, the word agape, A-G-A-P long E, agape. And this is the love of action. It's something you do, not something you feel, something you do.

Something you do for someone who needs your help. Very practical word. Now, it's not totally detached from feeling because it's usually born of pity or compassion.

That you feel sorry for someone, but that in itself, feeling sorry for them, is not agape. Agape is doing something for them after you felt sorry for them. You got the picture? Agape is a very selfless word.

You don't need to be attracted to the person you do it to. In fact, they may be very unattractive people. I think of a dear lady who worked among the slums of London, did an amazing job, and somebody said to her, aren't the people you help so grateful for your help and isn't that a reward for your service?

She said, don't you believe it? They never even say thank you. The person talking to her said, well, how can you go on helping them? And it was just a complete puzzle for them that a person can go on serving people in their needs with no thank you and no sort of affection in return, just an increasing demand for more help.

But she went on doing it because she wasn't dependent on a response from them. She wasn't dependent on gratitude because agape is a self-governed affection that doesn't need a response in relationship.

It sees a need and meets the need. When somebody asked Jesus, how do I love my neighbor, he told them the story of the Good Samaritan.

The key to that story is that it was a Samaritan. Trying to illustrate that one day, I used a story I'd read in the paper about a South African gold mine.

The white supervisor down the mine was caught in a rock fall and trapped hundreds of feet down into the ground in Johannesburg. They tried to reach him and realised they couldn't.

The man actually was lying in a coma, deep, deep down. And they managed to make a little hole that somebody could get through the rockfall, but it was still very, very dangerous.

And a black African volunteered to go in, knowing that he might never come out. But he did come out, dragging the white man with him.

And the white man was rushed to hospital and recovered, came out of the coma and made a good recovery. And they asked the white man in Johannesburg Hospital, would you like to meet the man who saved you?

And he said, oh, yes, I must meet him. Thank him. And they brought into the ward the black man.

Who saved him. And the white man in the bed turned aside to the wall and said, I won't talk to him. Now, the black man would have to have agape to do anything more for that white man.

If he had agape, he would. You got the feel of the thing. It's regardless of any worthiness, any desert, any gratitude, regardless of anything in return.

Agape will go on meeting the need. And that's the kind of love that God has. And it is so rare among human beings that they had to have this word for his love.

And it was rarely used in normal Greek. It was there in their dictionary and only very occasionally used a rare humanitarian act.

And the Christians picked up that word and said, because it isn't a word that's used widely for all kinds of other things, we'll use that word for the love of God.

Now you can appreciate straight away that just simply to say God loves you to an unbeliever whose only understanding of love is one of the other three at least. You're just not beginning on the right foot.

But it has become the gospel for so many people. God loves you. But we've got to begin much further back than that. What should we begin with? Well, let me first say that if you go through the Bible carefully, the whole Bible, you will find there is very little about the love of God.

Even in an English Bible where the word love is used. It's hardly ever used. Now you may wonder at that straight away. You'll have to check me out in your Bible because we hear preachers use the word so often that we think the Bible's full of it.

There's nothing about the love of God in Genesis. There is one verse in Exodus. There's nothing in Leviticus, nothing in Numbers.

There's one paragraph in Deuteronomy. There's nothing in Joshua or Judges or Ruth or 1 Samuel. And I could go on through the Bible, and you'll never find the love of God mentioned.

When you get to the book of Psalms, you begin to find it mentioned, because those are written by people who are so grateful for God's agape that they are praising him for it.

And they say, your love endures forever. As soon as you get past the Psalms, there's quite a lot about eros in the Song of Songs, and that, as I told you, is an analogy, not an allegory, but an analogy.

For divine and humans loving one another. But you move on. Nothing in Proverbs. You get to the prophets. There is one verse in Isaiah, one in Jeremiah, and one in Ezekiel.

And there's nothing in Daniel. And then there are twelve minor prophets. There's only one of them. You'll find the word love, and that's Hosea. You won't find it in the rest.

But the surprise comes when you turn to the New Testament, neither Matthew, Mark, nor Luke mention the love of God. Now check me out on this. It may be a surprise to you.

John does two or three times only, and of course we all know John 3.16 and we can all quote it, but it's not mentioned much in the rest of John.

The Book of Acts is about the early church, its preaching, and how it's spread far and wide through that preaching, and there are sermons in there. Not one of them mentions the love of God, not one.

Romans, there's one verse out of the whole letter. I just read you a definition of the gospel that, according to Paul, I'm not ashamed of the gospel, it's the power of God for salvation of everyone who believes, first for the Jew, then for the Gentile, because in it is revealed the righteousness of God from faith to faith, as it is written, the just who live by faith.

And why I read that to you is there's nothing there about the love of God, not a mention. And so we go on through the letters. One or two of them mention the love of God, but most don't.

Finally, in the first epistle of John, we come across the statement, God is love. But it's not in a section that's describing God. It's a section about our behaviour in which the writer says, God is love, so we must love one another.

So the context isn't even what we call a theological section, which is talking about God. It's talking about us and what we should be.

But those three words have been lifted out of their context and put up on the wall and put in people's minds and hearts in golden letters. This is the gospel. God is love. But you've got to get to almost the last page of the Bible before you find out.

And you get to the book of Revelation, which we're looking at this weekend, and there's no mention of the love of God from beginning to end. Now, all this may come as a bit of a shock to you, and I can only ask you to check me out.

And if you find that what I've told you is right, then can we ever say the gospel is God loves you, or even God is love? Because they never preach that. Right through the Book of Acts.

And we've got sermons by Peter

Here is the cleaned and formatted sermon transcription:

He had produced churches all over the Mediterranean area. How did they do that without mentioning love? And the problem these Youth of the Mission workers had with me was… If we can't mention the love of God, I didn't say they couldn't. I just said the apostles didn't. They said, what have we got to say? You've robbed us of our gospel. Dear me, what a situation. And especially when we start using adjectives about God's love that the Bible never did. You'll never find the phrase unconditional love in your Bible.

Yet that is now on the lips of almost every Christian preacher I hear. And when I ask, what do you mean by that? And they tell me, I say that means that God could never send anybody to hell. Well, if that's so, we've got away from the Bible. And those who preach the unconditional love of God have to drop the thought of judgment. Judgment, because how could a God of unconditional love judge anyone? That would be conditional love.

But actually, when I open my Bible and read about God's love, I find it is conditional. I find statements like this, "God loves those who keep his commandments." God loves those who fear him. And those two are from the Old Testament, but if I turn to the New Testament, to Jesus himself, listen to what he said.

He said, if you obey my commands, it's on the last night before he died, you will remain in my love just as I have obeyed my father's commands and remain in his love. That's not unconditional love. That's a conditional love. To remain in God's love, you live God's way. And Jesus did just that. He remained in God's love because he lived by God's rule.

Well, now, all that, the fact that explicit statements of God's love are so few and far between in your Bible. The fact that never did Jesus use God's love in his public preaching. He talked about it to his inner circle of disciples, but he never publicly preached about the love of God. And I believe that's because, as he said on another occasion, don't throw pearls to pigs.

And he said that. In other words, don't throw something precious to those who can't appreciate it. He said, pigs will turn and rend you. They won't thank you for the pearls, they'll turn and rend you. And he never spoke of the fatherhood of God in public or the love of God in public, almost as if it was too precious to throw out before unbelievers.

And so he warned us, don't cast your pearls to pigs. And I've never heard a preacher preach on that. Isn't that amazing? But it's one thing he said in the Sermon on the Mount. Don't do it. So what are we going to talk about? I mean, that's really going to affect our evangelism quite deeply, isn't it?

What do we preach about God to people? Well, let's try and find something else in God. What about telling people that God is good? And it's certain that he is. The only snag with that is that the word good has also been debased, like the word love.

In fact, the words good God have become an expletive in English. Do people use it here? Good God. I mean, that's a wonderful statement. But when you hear it said like that, you think, what does that mean? But even in ordinary language, we talk about a good holiday, a good meal. What do we mean?

Or we even talk about a good dog. Now, to talk about a good God and then reverse the letters of D-O-G, or G-O-D, and talk about a good God with the same word. What does it mean? And I'm afraid good has become a word that we can't use because we've used it for things that are not good.

Let me tell you what I mean. The original word good is an absolute word that means perfect. It means to be good in every detail, every part. And that is why someone came to Jesus and said, "Good master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" And he said, "Why did you call me good? No one is good but God alone."

Now, I don't believe Jesus for one moment was saying, I'm not good. I think he was saying, you should only use the word good about God alone. That you could use it about me. He is testing the man to see whether he really recognized God in Christ.

But whichever way you interpret that question and the answer, Jesus said, no one is good but God alone. So even a husband and a wife can't say to each other, "You've been a good husband or you've been a good wife." It means in its essential etymology perfect, but since most people use it of things and people that are far less than perfect, how can we use it of God?

What we're needing is an unused word in the English dictionary that we could use to describe God that would convey something special to people. That would make them think. And I believe there is such a word in English which you hardly ever hear used in daily conversation, but it's in the dictionary.

And it's a word that's used in the Bible, and it's the word righteous. Do you know when Jesus prayed, you look at his prayers? How did he address his father? Well, we know he used the word Abba, which means Dad, but he used adjectives in front. Sometimes he said, "Holy Father," and that made all the difference.

He's not like your earthly dad, he's different. But he sometimes used the phrase, "Righteous Father." And I've got into a habit in my own prayer of using that adjective, righteous father. And somehow it says something about God that makes him different, even from the best earthly father. He is righteous.

And that's why Paul, when he defined the gospel, said, "In it is revealed a righteousness from God." That's the great benefit of the gospel. Somehow that's the gift of the gospel that we need to convey to people or find ways of communicating to them.

That the gospel is a righteousness from God. And that's the good news that Paul preached. And that, I believe, is the gospel that we are to preach. It's not just the righteousness of God, it's the righteousness from God.

So let's begin to say what we mean by righteous when we apply it to God. Have you ever heard it applied to anybody else? You have. Nobody else has. It's just not used much. And if you do, it's somebody pretty good who it's said of.

But when we take this English word, which people won't use, and use it of God, we're getting near to the heart of the Gospel. What does it mean? It has both a positive and a negative aspect. The positive aspect is this: everything God does is right. That's what righteous means.

Everything he ever does is always right. Now, what a God to have. Can you imagine worshipping a God who can get things wrong or who makes mistakes or can be in error? Your faith will be shaky. Our faith is rock solid because we've got a God who always does what is right.

He cannot be bribed. He cannot be persuaded to do wrong. He cannot be corrupted. We are in a world where politicians can be corrupted, where all kinds of people can be corrupted, and what happens? You don't trust them. But you can trust a God that nobody can corrupt.

He will always do what is right, what is fair, what is just, and he can never do anything against that. He can never be unfair. He can never be unjust. He can never be bribed. Or as the Bible puts it, he has no favorites, and nobody is God's favorite.

And Paul makes use of that in the rest of Romans. God has no favorites. He is absolutely fair with everyone. I think that's wonderful. No favoritism. No corruption.

Abraham found that out with Sodom. When Abraham was worried about his nephew Lot living in the city of Sodom, he had an argument with God. He said, "God, would you destroy that city if there were 50 good people in it? What about 40?" And he climbed down. Would you destroy the city with one?

And then he came to the wonderful conclusion, shall not the judge of all the earth do right? No bribery, no favoritism, a God who is right.

The negative aspect of righteous is that he cannot do anything wrong. And the idea that God can do anything is not true.

I once got a sheet of paper and I wrote at the top, "the things almighty God cannot do." And I got to a list of 30 very quickly. I remember the first one was, "God cannot tell a lie."

Then I began to add others. God cannot tell a dirty joke. God cannot be prejudiced. And I went on.

I wrote all these things down, and when I'd finished the page – I've still got the page at home in my study – I suddenly had the horrible thought, I've done every one of those things. I didn't feel bigger than God, because I could do thirty things he couldn't.

It was a very sobering exercise, and it made me understand God a bit better. To know what he couldn't ever do because he's righteous.

Now, all that leads on a God who cannot think an impure thought, speak an untrue word, make an unfair deal. That's a wonderful God to have because it means we live in a moral universe and that God will have the last word and it will be the right word.

And one day he has promised to put everything right. He's a very patient God, and that often worries us. We want everything done by next Tuesday at the latest. But God can wait.

But a righteous God must one day put everything right. Or he's not God. And he's promised to do that.

And, of course, that's where the Day of Judgment comes in because that's going to be involved. The Gospel is we can be put right now and get ready for the future when God puts everything right and then we can enjoy a world in which everything is right and there's nothing wrong.

Gosh, can you imagine a world without temptation? Almost impossible, isn't it? But we're looking forward to a world in which everything's right. But the gospel is a gospel that God can put you right. And that's the gospel I preach when I go to top security prisons and preach to murderers and drug dealers.

And boy, that's a gospel they respond to. I don't tell them God loves them. I tell them God can put you right. I even tell them, one day God will put you sitting in the judge's seat of a court, and you will apply his justice.

And their eyes come out on stalks. I can't believe it. They've all been told, and you go to prison for life by a judge on earth. And I'm telling them their future is to judge the nation if they let God put them right first.

And God can do it because he is almighty to do that, and he can do it with the worst. I was invited to preach at a unique service in London. You probably don't know the temple as it's called in the Strand, which is one of the most prominent streets in London, and it's near all the law courts and what they call the inns.

Of the lawyers. Once a year, all the top judges have an annual service of worship. One year, I was invited to preach to them. It's a frightening occasion. The judges all leave their wigs at home, but their faces look just the same.

The temple is a very old church in which the Crusader Knights are buried. It's a round church with echoes, and the pulpit looks and feels like a dock in a court. You don't have a dock here, do you? A sort of pen where the prisoner stands.

And you get into the pulpit and you look down and see all the top judges' faces in a row. It's a ghastly experience. I was told they were going to put a new amplification system in the following week. I said, that's too late for me because whatever you say comes back at you five times from the walls.

So I started off with a joke. I said, "I've been told the agnostics are very bad in this building." There was a dead silence. Nobody smiled.

And one of our top judges then was Lord Denning, and he read the lesson from the Bible. And afterwards, I did ask someone, why did nobody laugh at my joke about the agnostics? You got the joke, didn't you?

Yes. Acoustics. But they said, that's Lord Denning's favorite joke. That was the chief judge.

So it all just went flat. They thought I was imitating the judge. And, you know, I thought, what can I preach to all these judges? And I thought of a phrase in Romans chapter 8 where Paul said, "What the law could not do, God did through his son Jesus Christ."

And I said, I'm here to tell you what the law can't do, what you as judges in the land can't do. The law... cannot turn a bad man into a good man.

You can punish him, you can deter others through fear of punishment, but you can't change a man on the inside from a bad man to a good man. And what the law cannot do, God did.

And then I told them of some of the worst criminals that are now my Christian brother friends. You may not have heard of a gang in the east of London headed up by twin brothers called the Cray Brothers. Anybody heard?

They were the worst gang in East London for years. Protection racket, prostitution, you name it, they went into everything. And the Cray Brothers became famous.

In the gang, they had a Greek man called Chris Lambriano, and he was the man who got rid of the bodies for them. And his favorite method of getting rid of them was to go to where they were building a flyover of a road, and while the cement was still wet, to push the body into the cement.

That was his favorite way of getting rid of their victims. And finally they were caught and all sentenced to life.

In an early day, before 1961, they would have been sentenced to death, but they got life instead. And Chris Lambrian, who found himself in prison for life, and he was a big, tough man, and he was very angry.

And he became so angry with everybody that they put him in solitary confinement in a cell with an iron bedstead cemented into the floor and a bucket for a toilet and that's it. And he got worse and worse.

A prison visitor gave him a box of books to read, and on top of them was a Bible. I think the visitor must have been a Christian, but there was a Bible. And he picked up the Bible first, and he did know enough to say to himself, "This is a book that can do you good, I'm told."

So he said, right, I'll try it out. So he slept on it, like that. And for the first time in his life, he could sleep through a night.

And he thought, it's a good book. It does you good. So from then on, he wore it inside his jacket like this, against his heart. And he felt better and better.

And so he began to read it. And he found it difficult. But he read about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And one night he woke up in his cell.

And standing at the foot of his bed were three bearded men. And he said, "I know who you are. You're the Father, you're the Son, you're the Holy Spirit."

And the middleman said to him, just follow me, Chris. And from that moment, he was a good man. And he changed.

And the prison, I know the prison, the prison grounds were just a sea of mud. Barely completely. And he asked the governor, if you could turn them into a garden, what you call a backyard, but that's a dreadful word, a garden full of flowers.

And he created beauty all around... He accepted that he was in for life, but because of his changed attitude, he got parole, and he was released. And he spent the rest of his life in court.

Helping young men who got into trouble. So much so that the judges in Oxford Court, which is where this was, used to sentence young offenders, I sentenced you to live with Mr Lambriano for 12 months.

And he changed young people. Now I'll tell you how we met. The Radio London had a neat idea. They would bring together in the studio two opposite people who'd never met before and tell them to get to know each other on air. Quite a novel idea, actually.

And they would put together the most unlikely people. And I was asked if I'd be willing to go on the broadcast. And of course I said, who with? Well, they said, we'll give you his name, but it's Chris Lambriano.

And I said, well, I've never met him. I don't know who he is.

And so suddenly, we were both ushered in separate doors to the studio. The red light went on, and we were immediately on air for everybody to listen. Two complete strangers from totally different backgrounds.

Within two minutes, we'd fallen in love with each other. And they were astonished, the broadcasters. Within two minutes, we were talking as if we'd known each other 20 years.

It can only happen when the Holy Spirit's in both of you. It was quite a broadcast, and we became firm friends, and we've traveled the country since.

I thought, here's a man who was in a London gang, extortioner, gambler, pimp, the lot, and here we are together as brothers.

That's what I told them, the judges in that service. I said, the law can't do that. But God can.

So what a gospel we have. A God who puts things right. A God who takes things that are wrong and turns them around.

However, there's a but, and it's a big one. Because he's a good God, because he's a righteous God, he must punish evil. He's got to, otherwise he's not a good God.

There are two things he has to do. He must punish evil and he must banish evil. If he's going to put the world right, he's got to do those two things.

And when we look at ourselves, what chance do we have? If God took us to heaven as we are now... or as I prefer to say, if God put us as we are now into the new heaven and the new earth, we'd ruin it in no time. We can't even keep this world right.

And therefore, unless we're changed, we'd ruin the next world if we went into it as we are now.

So, the Gospel has a tough side that we face first, and that is that we're just not good enough to go into a perfect world, or we'd ruin it. Noah's flood showed the righteousness

Here is the cleaned-up version of the sermon transcription:

The Nephilim are referred to in your Bible as giants, but it's not giants. We don't know what it means. It's a horrible cross between humans and angels. That was when the occult was introduced to the human race. That's when they began all the practices that later we know as astrology, as all the occult practices began then and spread from that day.

And you can guess how God was feeling, because it led to a total depravity of society in which it says, every thought of men's heart was only evil continually. Nobody had a good thought, and that's why God sent the flood. But he gave eight people another chance, Noah and his wife and his three sons and three daughters-in-law. Eight of them, because they were living right, and God is absolutely fair and absolutely just.

But an occult society in which everybody had bad thoughts the whole time was a society that God had to destroy. However, he said, I won't do that again until the end of the world, but then I'll have to do it again. He is amazingly patient with the rotten thoughts of men now, with all the practices of occultism, with all that goes on.

God is amazingly patient, but not forever. And therefore we must tell people there's coming a day when he will not just punish evil but banish it. That's his plan. And he will not save any angel at all. They have lived in heaven, they have known heaven. If they have rebelled against heaven as they have and become demons, there's no gospel for them whatever.

But the gospel for human beings is, I can change you. You can be, as I said the other day, perfect. Now I told you that my wife... It really comes near doubt when I tell her her husband will be perfect one day, but that's the truth. I will be. And she knows me better than anybody else, so she finds it most difficult to believe.

But I have to believe she will be perfect, because that's what the Gospel is about, making people perfect, making bad people into good people. That's the heart of the Gospel. Or to say it as Paul said it, In the gospel is our righteousness from God. From God. His righteousness given to us. His goodness, ours. His perfection, ours.

And if we don't preach that gospel, you finish up saying, God loves you, whatever you are. God likes you just as you are. Come as you are is a favorite chorus. Come as you are, come as you are. My Bible says change, repent. The new gospel says come as you are. God never said that.

In fact, I want to tell you one of the parables of Jesus. He said there was a king who held a great banquet for the marriage of his son, and he invited everybody to come. And people made excuses. I can't come. I've just started a business. I've just married a wife. I've just done, sorry, I can't come.

So the king said, well, go everywhere and persuade others to come and take their places. He said, my house shall be full. And so others came. And then comes the sting in the tail. A man turned up for the wedding feast of the king's son in his working clothes. He hadn't changed. And the king said to him in a kindly way, why haven't you changed for my son's wedding?

And he called him friend. And the man had no excuse, so he didn't answer at all. He could have changed. But he hadn't done so. He'd refused. And the king said, take that man, bind him hand and foot, and throw him out into the darkness where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

That's one of the most solemn stories Jesus told. And it's told for those who accept the invitation of the gospel, but who don't change, who could change, but resist it. And that means that you can accept the invitation of the gospel and still be thrown into hell at the end if you have resisted changing and said, I just want to go to heaven, I don't want to change.

Now that's where this cheap gospel of handing tickets out to heaven, you know, if you die tonight, where will you be? That cheap gospel leads to people becoming Christians, quote, coming to church. But not changing. And they don't realise that at the last day they'll be turning up to a wedding in old clothes.

Now it's a solemn parable alone would tell me that once saved, always saved isn't true. But it's a very serious parable, and it's saying he wants you at the feast, he invites you to come, he presses you to come, but he wants you to change.

Therefore, we should not preach the gospel in a way that people don't fully realise that it's an offer of changing them from a bad person into a good person, from an imperfect person to a perfect person. That's the offer of the gospel. That's good news.

It's only possible because of two aspects of righteousness when it comes to us. These are the two phases, if you like, of being saved. Sorry, I'm just looking for my notes, and I've lost the page. But I can give them to you from memory anyway. I'll give them to you with rather intellectual labels.

The two steps in which God's righteousness becomes ours are these. First, his righteousness is imputed to us. That's the theologian's phrase, none explain it. And secondly, that leads on to his righteousness being imparted to us. Have you got those two words? Imputed means that we don't have it yet, but we're treated as if we do.

Or to use a word that Paul used frequently, we're justified, meaning that God treats us as if we are already righteous, and then he helps us to be righteous. Now, I was talking to a headmaster of a school in the north of England, we called a Borstal Institution. After a man called Borstal who said instead of sending young people to prison where they'll be corrupted by the older prisoners, let's send young prisoners to schools which are virtually prisons, tough places where at least they'll be punished but at least kept away from hardened criminals.

And he started Borstal Schools. I was talking to the headmaster of a Borsal School in Yorkshire, and he told me a very interesting story. He said there was a boy sent to our school for punishment for a crime, and he said we could do nothing with him. We tried the tough treatment, and we tried the soft treatment. We tried punishing him, we tried rewarding him. Nothing got through.

He was so stubborn. So hard that we were just giving up. And he said, then I thought of something we could do. He said it was a shock to me. And he was a Christian. He said, I think the Lord had laid it on my heart. But he said, I called the boy into my office and I said, now look boy, we've tried every way we can to help you to be better, but we failed.

But he said, there's one thing that I think I could do. That might help to make you better. And this boy looked up and waited for it, and that headmaster said, I want to adopt you as my son. I want to give you my name, and I want you to come and live in my home as my boy.

And the headmaster told me, he said, that boy, I won't say he was perfect from that day, but he began to be. And he began to change. Now what he'd done was impute righteousness to him. He said, I'll adopt you as my son and treat you as my son, make you my son and heir, and you come and live with me as if you'd never committed a crime.

He was imputing righteousness, treating him as if he was already good. And the beauty is that the boy began to want to be good. And bit by bit was changed. That's the gospel.

Did you notice I didn't use the word love? He didn't say, I love you. Actually, it was a supreme example of agape. It really was. Because it was a terrific risk to run.

And he got him legally adopted and gave him a name and said, you know, if you get into trouble now, it's my name. He'll drag down. That's exactly what God does. You're mine now. You were a Christian, and I'm treating you as if you'd never sinned.

That's what justification is. It's righteousness imputed as if it's there already. You got the idea? But there's a kind of preaching that is going around that thinks that's all you need, and it stems from Martin Luther and the Reformers.

The justification by faith is the whole of salvation. It's all you need. And dear Luther never discovered what I called sanctification by faith, which is righteousness imparted. Because to be justified is only a means to an end, and the end is to get you changed and to change you from a bad lad into a good lad, to make you perfect.

Because only perfect people... will be allowed by God into a new perfect universe, which is his intention to create. Now, that's a big gospel to me. That's a whole gospel to me. And it stops you saying, I'm saved. And it makes you say, I'm being saved. I'm on the way of salvation. I'll get there, but I'm still on the way.

And that's why I'm not saved yet, but I'm on the way. And I'm heading in the right direction. And God is making me better. My wife at least acknowledges that, that I'm a better person than I used to be. So she does recognise progress, but I have to keep telling her that I'm going to be perfect.

The only thing is that when you're perfect, you don't say so. You understand what I've said.