Let's hear from God. I want to read to you from the Word of God. I am not ashamed of the Gospel because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. First for the Jew and then for the Gentile. For in the Gospel a righteousness from God is revealed. A righteousness that is but from faith.

By faith from first to last, just as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness. Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile. And their foolish hearts were darkened.

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over to the sinful desires of their hearts. To sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator who is forever praised.

Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way also men abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the penalty for their perversion.

Furthermore, since they did not think it worth their while to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice.

They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful. They invent ways of doing evil. They disobey their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, pitiless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do those very things, but also approve of those who practice them.

Pretty grim picture, but frankly you could read the same thing in the Sunday newspapers today. God's wrath is being revealed on this country very clearly. Moving over the pages, I'm in Paul's letter to the Romans. Moving over, this is what he says later.

Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness.

Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. Moses describes in this way the righteousness that is by the law. The man who does these things will live by them. But the righteousness that is by faith says, do not say in your heart, "Who will ascend into heaven? That is to bring Christ down." Or "who will descend into the deep? That is to bring Christ up from the dead."

But what does it say? The word is near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart. That is the word of faith we are proclaiming. That if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the scripture says, everyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame. For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile. The same Lord is the Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him.

For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Let me talk to the Lord about you before I talk to you about him. Abba Father, we have come to sit at your feet. And we pray that you will deliver us from all pride or prejudice that could prevent us from hearing what you have to say to us.

Lord, deliver us from traditions. Bring us into the truth that sets us free. May we come to you with an open mind, a heart that seeks to respond to your love, and a will that is ready to do something about what we hear. And to you be the sole glory. In Jesus' name. Amen.

It is a real honour and privilege to be invited to speak at this graduation service of the Bible School, its final graduation service. And what I have to say is primarily addressed to the students, not only of the last year, but I understand about 40 students from previous years are among us.

I apologize for my voice. I'm still struggling with the after effects of a stroke, which robbed me of my speech last July, just before I made the most important recorded message of my life. About this country being taken over by Islam. And this stroke for which the doctors can find no cause, whatever, my blood pressure, my blood flow, my sugar, my cholesterol, everything is absolutely normal.

But just before I was due to record that five-hour message, I was robbed of my speech. Hundreds of people prayed and I was able to make the recording and speak for five and a half hours. But I finished standing on one leg with my left side totally paralyzed. But the message has gone out and it's coming out as a book on September 11th by a coincidence.

Now I come to this important service of graduation of Bible students with mixed emotions. One feeling I have is envy. I think, you know what? To be able to start your ministry now, I'd love to go back and start again. With all that I've managed to learn and experience, I'd love to be starting again like you.

But I'm in my mid-70s now, so as my children say, I've got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana skin. I also have a feeling of anxiety. And I'm going to share that anxiety with you this morning. It focuses on two questions. First, what kind of God are you going to present to the world you go back to?

And the second is, what kind of gospel are you going to preach? And these are the two questions I want to answer now. First of all, what kind of God are you going to present to this sad, sick, sordid, sinful world? According to a recent census, 74% of the British population believe in God.

But that is quite irrelevant and insignificant. It is meaningless because it's very obvious that their belief in God doesn't affect their lives one little bit. Why is that? You see, it is no longer good enough to ask people, do you believe in God? First of all, we need now to ask which God?

Because there are so many gods now being worshipped in this country and every country with the mobility of population. Different religions now live in the same street. You probably have a different god next door to you. And so the first question is not do you believe in God, but which god do you believe in?

I think the majority in this country would probably say, well, the God the church believes in, even if they don't go to church. But there still is a further question that we must ask. What kind of God do you think that God is? Because it really doesn't matter whether you believe in God or not.

What does matter is what kind of God you do or don't believe in. As a chaplain in the Royal Air Force, I had to look after everyone whom the Roman Catholic and the Anglicans wouldn't look after. And so I got Methodists, Baptists, Salvation Army, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and even atheists and agnostics.

And so I was chaplain to atheists. That's a very interesting job. To look after the soul of someone who's put on his arrival card, religion, atheist. And when I met an atheist, I used to say three things to him. First of all, I used to congratulate him on his faith. Because it takes far more faith to be an atheist than to be a Christian.

To believe that all this universe came from nothing all by itself. That requires huge faith. To believe that someone put it here is much easier. And then secondly, I would tell him, now supposing you are killed, and we had many people killed, supposing you are killed while you're here, I will have to take your funeral.

And I want to promise you that I will not mention God, I will not pray, I will not read from the Bible, and I won't sing a hymn. I will simply say, this man is dead and gone. And I made a very interesting discovery. Atheists don't mind living as atheists, but they're a bit scared of dying as one.

That's too much of a gamble. And my third question to them was, now sit down there and tell me what kind of God you don't believe in. And when he'd finished, I could always say, well, you've just made me an atheist too. Because I don't believe in that kind of God either.

Never condemn an atheist until you find out what kind of God he was told to believe in. Because the real question is what kind of God do we believe? What kind of God do we as Christians present to the world out there?

Very basic questions. Is he a kind God or a cruel God? Does he care about us or is he indifferent to us? What kind of God is he? Does he hate us or love us? Is he strict or lenient?

Now this kind of question is going to make a very big difference to the way we live. The kind of God you believe in. What does he think about us? How does he feel about us? And above all, what will he do with us in the day when we meet him face to face?

Now the most common answer to what is God like given today is that God is love. And I'm going to tell you that I believe we have made a terrible mistake in presenting that picture of God to the world.

But that is almost the universal picture. When people say, what is God like? Well, he is love. As if the heart of the gospel is, God loves you. That is not the heart of the New Testament gospel, but it's the preaching everywhere today.

And indeed we are now hearing a phrase, I know who coined it, I won't name him, but he coined a new phrase which you hear from almost every pulpit today. It's the phrase, unconditional love of God.

You won't find those words in the Bible. But that adjective that's been added is now the heart of the gospel that is being presented so widely that God loves you unconditionally.

Where did we get such an idea? What do people understand that to mean? Well, living in Danbury in Essex are two men who live together in a homosexual marriage.

They hit the headlines because they wanted a baby and of course physically they couldn't have one. So they paid a surrogate mother in Florida to have a baby for them and then imported the baby into this country. They had difficulties getting an import license for the baby and it hit all the headlines.

They now have imported another second baby so that they can be, quote, a family. They went to the local vicar in Danbury to ask him to christen the babies. And at least the vicar showed some hesitation about this.

He might not have done today, but he did then. And then one of those men, the, quote, husband of the two men, said to the vicar, but God's love is unconditional. It is non-judgmental.

He was saying, if you represent this God of unconditional love, you have no right to refuse to christen our babies. You should be welcoming us as we are, with open arms. And indeed, we've just sung a chorus, come just as you are.

Did you ever find that in the Bible? I didn't. The idea that God loves everybody unconditionally, wants them all to come to him just as they are and everybody can be then happy.

That is not the gospel or the God we are to present to the world. It implies when we emphasize to unbelievers that God is love that we are lovable. Because we measure his love by ours.

And our love is drawn out when we meet someone or see something that we instinctively love. It is lovable to us. And so by extension, people think that we must be lovable to God.

You know, God had to tell the Jews, I don't love you because you're special. You're special because I love you. And that is the biblical emphasis.

God doesn't love us because we are lovable, but because he is love. And that's a very different thing.

And so we have had what I believe is an overemphasis on the God of love in our preaching to unbelievers. Something that the New Testament apostles never did.

Some years ago, I wrote a book called The Road to Hell. I wrote it out of a great burden because I found that even evangelical Christians in this country, leading Bible teachers, no longer believed in hell.

And so I wrote a book about hell. I wrote it with tears. My wife could never have written it. She believes in hell, but when we talk about it, she cannot help thinking of relatives and friends who are likely to finish up there.

Who are likely to finish up there. But it was advertised in a Christian national magazine under this headline, Read David Pawson's Autobiography, The Road to Hell.

I don't know where they got that idea from. But as soon as it was published, I was invited to appear on television and many radio stations in this country because apparently I was a weirdo who still believed in hell.

And the interview would always begin with the same question. It got boring. The question was, how can a God of love send anyone to hell?

And I always answered with a question because I learned that technique from Jesus. And so I said to them, where on earth did you get the idea that God was a God of love?

And that shook them to the core. They would stammer and stutter and say, well, don't Christians believe that? Didn't Jesus teach that?

I said, as a matter of fact, he did. But everything I know about hell, I learned from Jesus.

He's the only person who's told us about it. There's nothing about hell in your Old Testament. There is hardly a mention of hell in any of the epistles in the New Testament.

Paul doesn't tell us about it. Peter doesn't. John doesn't. Who told you about hell?

Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount. So I said to the interviewer, now then. If I learned about the love of God and about hell from the same person, does that mean he was telling the truth in one situation and a lie in another?

Are you picking and choosing what Jesus said that suits your thinking? Now it's usually at that point they drew the interview to a rapid close.

But you see, the impression we've given by preaching a God of love is to rule out the possibility of hell. It is also to convey to people that there will be no judgment because how could a God of love judge us and send us to hell?

You see what we've done. We've taken something that's very sacred to us and we've thrown it out without any mention of what God hates or what disgusts him or what makes him angry.

But the Bible is full of such things. What disgusts God? When we confuse our gender, when men dress up in women's clothes and women in men's clothes, when men have sexual relations with men and women with women, that is described in your Bible as an abomination.

To God, it means he's disgusted by it. In all the debate that's going on, it was on the radio as I drove here this morning, in all this debate that's going on about the church in England.

Nobody seems to be asking, how does God feel about this? Not how do the gay clergy feel about it. This morning said on the radio that in one... Theological college, 60% of the students are gay. In another, 40% are gay.

And these are all men training for the ministry. And no one's asking, what does God feel about it? On so many issues, we discuss it. What do these Christians say? What do those Christians say?

But really, we need to get back to God and say, what does God say? And what does he feel? And what does he think?

But when we say God is love and stop there, we are conveying a God who is tolerant, who is indulgent, who wants to pat us on the head and say, there, there, boys will be boys, let's forgive and forget.

That's not the God we worship. The result of this preaching a God of love to unbelievers is very manifest.

First, in the loss of reverence for God. Not a popular word today. Reverence means respect, but it means much more than that. It means awe. It means the fear of God.

And if there is one thing that has disappeared from this nation, it is fear of God. And that is because it has largely disappeared from the church.

Because fears are infectious, they are caught, they are passed on. And if we in the church have lost our fear of God, then it is not surprising that the world has lost its fear of the Lord as well.

And it is the fear of the Lord that brings reverence to us. We're told in the New Testament we should worship with awe and reverence because God is a consuming fire.

He's not just fire, he's a consuming fire. That's a quote from Deuteronomy, but there it is in Hebrews in the New Testament.

Now what's a consuming fire? I think of two experiences I've had.

I was caught in a bushfire in Australia and the flames were leaping from eucalyptus tree full of oil to eucalyptus tree at 60 miles an hour, fanned by a gale.

And people were jumping into their cars and driving down country lanes at 70 miles an hour to escape from this consuming fire which went through their house and destroyed their belongings in minutes.

That's a consuming fire. And I know how I felt when I was in it.

And then I was visiting Sicily. I was in a lawless city where there had been 200 murders by the mafia in just 12 months.

That was scary enough. But when I came to fly home, the British Airways plane took off from Catania Airport and flew over Mount Etna, which is the sole... or the greatest live volcano in Europe, and it was erupting.

And we could see the red hot lava flowing down the mountainside, destroying villages as it flowed. It was frightening.

I'm going to share with you my anxiety about this issue. It focuses on two questions. First,

Here is the cleaned and formatted sermon transcription:

Lightening sight. And the pilot, to give us a thrill, decided to let us look right down into the mouth of it. And he tipped the plane up like this and flew in a tight circle around the volcano mouth. And I was on that side of the plane and I found myself looking straight down. Into this red hot boiling molten rock spewing out stones and rocks and I was relieved when he straightened up and headed for Heathrow.

But as he flew on, I found myself thinking, that feeling in the pit of my stomach I had then, wishing he'd straighten up and fly on. I should have that when I go to church on a Sunday morning. But I confess I don't often do. That's the God we're dealing with. A God to fear.

And fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But as I talk to people around the country, I find they fear everything else but God. They fear old age, they fear cancer, they fear AIDS, they fear bankruptcy, they fear all kinds of disasters, fear losing their job, losing their home. But I rarely meet anybody who is afraid of God.

How strange. Because in fact the fear of the Lord cures every other fear. If you fear God, you will fear nobody and nothing else. You will respect God, you will reverence God. And this will show in our worship.

I'm not speaking about this morning, but I go to fellowships where the worship is a little better than a disco. And someone said to me recently, we worship God Almighty in our church. I thought you put your finger right on it. Where is that reverence? We become casual, even with God, as if we're just having a party.

We're in the presence of Almighty God. He could wipe me out in a moment if he wished. And had he given me what I deserved, you would not have a preacher this morning. I'll tell you something else. There'd be nobody sitting down there either if he dealt with us as we deserved.

The contrast between much Christian worship and the Muslim worship in a mosque is stark. Have you ever watched Muslims at worship? Seen them prostrate on the floor before Allah. Seen them saying prayers, standing, then kneeling, then going down before God. There is no such thing as entertainment there. They're not into user-friendly worship. They're there because they fear God.

And when I talk to Muslims, I find they have more fear of God than the average Christian. I'm not going to become a Muslim because of that. But I am going to challenge Christians. Do you fear God? Are you afraid of him?

There's a balance. He is a loving father, but he's also a consuming fire. And you've got to take God as a whole. You can't take the bits you like and leave the rest.

The other thing that is absent when we just preach God is love is repentance. Repentance. Instead of calling people to repent, we call them in terms of language of acceptance. We say, accept Jesus. Accept him as your Savior. Invite him into your life.

That's not what the apostles said. They didn't use any of those phrases. They said, repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins. When Jesus came preaching, he didn't say believe. He said, repent and believe.

The first step in becoming a Christian is to repent. But if all you've heard is God loves you, there's no incentive to repent. If you've been told, come just as you are and God will accept you, you won't repent. But it is the very first step into the kingdom of God on earth.

And you only... Repent when you hear something more about God than that he loves you. Let me give you two practical illustrations.

I was speaking up in Aberdeen in a theatre for three evenings in an evangelistic crusade. Now, I'm not an evangelist, but every so often I take a crusade just to prove that I'm not. And God always embarrasses me. But I'm not. I'm a teacher.

And we need to know what we are so we don't try and pretend or try to be what God hasn't called us to be. But here I was preaching the gospel and on the second night a girl came up to me afterwards. She was crying. Her face was streaky. She was shaking. She was obviously deeply disturbed, very upset.

And I said, what's the matter? She said, Mr. Pawson, you frustrate me. And I said, how? What have I done? She said, you've made me want to be a Christian. I said, but that's why I've come to Aberdeen. Hallelujah. No, she said, I have tried to be a Christian for 18 months.

She said, every evangelist who's come to Aberdeen, I've gone forward at the end of the meeting, I've been counseled, I've been told what to do, but she said, nothing has changed. Nothing has happened, and I came to the conclusion there's nothing in it. But she said, a friend dragged me here tonight, and you just raised it all again, and I'm frustrated, I want to be a Christian, I've tried to be, I've done everything I was told, and nothing has happened.

Well, that's a situation where you have to ask the Holy Spirit for a word of knowledge. So I did, and he gave me one. I looked the girl in the eye and I said, who are you living with? She said, a young man. I said, are you living as if you were married? Yes.

Why aren't you married? Well, he just says it's a bit of paper. And we don't need a bit of paper, we love each other, and so we're living together. I said, and if he left you tomorrow, He's not breaking any promise to you because he never made any promise to you.

Oh, she said, he won't leave. He loves me too much. Then I said, you have a very difficult decision to make. I said, I wish I could make it for you, but I can't. You'll have to make it. Which man do you want to live with? That young man or Jesus?

You can't live with both. I said, you've got to make the choice. Now she said, nobody else told me that. I said, but nobody else has been able to help you. And I'm telling you what will help you.

Now she then got very angry and she walked out. And she ran out to the theatre, sobbing her heart out. My heart followed her. I prayed for that girl, I wept for her. I've been back to Aberdeen to try and find her. And I haven't found her.

You see, the one thing she was never told was to repent. She was being encouraged to come to the Lord just as she was. But repent means you turn away from the things the Lord doesn't like and you come with those behind you. Then God accepts you.

Tell you about a young man who came to my front door on a motorbike with handlebars up here and lots of mirrors and he had a black leather jacket covered with brass studs. Do you know the kind of... And there he was.

I said, what do you want, Paul? He said, I want to talk. Okay, come on in. And he came in and he squirmed his way into our settee. It still has the marks on it.

And I said, what do you want to talk about, Paul? He said, I want to be baptized. I said, do you know how we baptize people? He said, yeah, I've seen it. You duck them in the water.

So I said, you want to be ducked in the water? Yeah. I said, well, Paul, there's just one thing. Do you know what the word repent means? No. I said, well, quite simply, I want you to go home and I want you to ask Jesus this question: Is there anything in my life you don't like?

And I said, when he answers the question, cut that right out and come back to me.

I waited three weeks and then boom, boom, there he is on the door. And when I opened the door, he just said, there. I said, what do you mean, there? He said, I've stopped biting my nails.

So I baptized him. Why, why do you laugh?

Many of you didn't even have to produce that kind of proof of repentance before you were baptized. You were only asked to make a profession of faith. But in my Bible, baptism requires proof of repentance beforehand. And that boy gave me proof that he would cut out what the Lord didn't like.

And he's never looked back. He's gone on as he began. He's still repenting because you go on repenting all your Christian life. But you've got to begin repenting at the very beginning if you want to be a Christian.

So many Christians should have repented years ago when they came to Christ of things that are still in their life and still damaging their progress in the Christian life. It's amazing, but all of the world I hear God. Through prophetic voices calling his people to repent. His people. Because most of them only came to accept Jesus.

They didn't come to repent at the beginning. And it leaves a whole lot of baggage from your past life and your present life. And it holds you back spiritually.

Well, let me move on. I want to say something that may surprise you or even shock you. There is very little about the love of God in your Bible. And yet we've made it the biggest thing.

Isn't that extraordinary? Let me go through it. You've got to read almost to the last page before you find the three words, God is love. But let's start at the beginning.

The first five books of the Bible are called the Pentateuch or the Torah to the Jew. They're the law of Moses. Do you know that there's only one verse in the first five books of the Bible about the love of God in Deuteronomy?

I've already quoted it, where God said, I didn't love you because you were special. You were special because I loved you.

That's the only mention. One verse in the first five books. Then you go through the historical books, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles. You go through those books and underline every reference to the love of God. You won't use up any ink.

There are some mentions of the love of God in the Psalms. I'll come back to that in a moment.

Then you get to the prophets. The major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, go through them with a pen and underline every reference to the love of God. You won't use up much ink.

In fact, you won't use any. Of the minor prophets, 12 of them, Daniel, Amos, so on, there's one that majors on the love of God and that's Hosea.

And he's the only one who does.

When Jonah went to Nineveh to preach, God didn't say, go and tell them I love them. He said, go and tell them I'm going to judge them. Turn to the New Testament.

What is there about the love of God in Matthew? Nothing. In Mark? Nothing. In Luke? Nothing.

I'll come back to John's Gospel in a moment.

Turn to the book of Acts. Now here is a description of the early church evangelizing the world. This is the early church on location. This is Dr. Luke recording what they preached, how they won people for Christ, how they established churches.

And you can go right through the book of Acts and there's not a single mention of the love of God. They never preached the love of God. Isn't that extraordinary?

Somebody got to me on the phone two weeks ago and said they had wanted to check me out in Scripture. Well, I'm thrilled when anybody checks me out.

And they'd gone through the book of Acts determined to prove that the apostles preached the love of God. And she came up with nothing, not one mention.

The epistles, well, there's one verse in the book of Romans about the love of God, which is shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, and nothing else.

There are two or three verses in Ephesians 3, and that's about it for the letters of the New Testament. Turn to the book of Revelation, there isn't a single mention of the love of God.

Now you may be shocked at this, but I ask you please, don't take my word for it. Go through your Bible, underlining how often the love of God is mentioned. You will be shattered.

That's one surprise, and here's the second surprise, and the more important one. What mention of the love of God there is, is always directed to the redeemed.

To those who've already repented and been forgiven. To those who now know that God loves them because he's forgiven them.

And they love him much the more they've been forgiven. But every mention of the love of God in scripture is to those who have already been redeemed.

That's true of the Old Testament. That's why the love of God appears in the Psalms. Because David is praising God for the love that kept him after his sin with Bathsheba.

And in the New Testament the same applies. Christians know the love of God because they've experienced it. Because they've been forgiven when they repented.

And then they're in a position to understand it.

Now let's come to John's Gospel. Because what we've done is make John 3.16 the whole of our Gospel.

And it's not the Gospel Paul preached, and it's not the Gospel Peter preached, it's not the Gospel John preached, or any of them. But we've made it our Gospel.

And yet, you know, John 3.16 has no mention of repentance. It just says, whoever believes.

And if you make it your whole gospel, you'll just say all you need to do is believe. You don't ask people to repent if your gospel is John 3.16.

Now, isn't that the gospel? No. For one very simple reason, or two I'll give you. First, John's gospel was written for believers.

He says that at the end of the gospel. It is not written to unbelievers. It is the worst of the four Gospels to give to an unbeliever.

We're just doing it because we hope they'll read as far as chapter 3 and find that they must be born again.

But why did John write this Gospel 60 years after Jesus died and rose again and after Matthew, Mark and Luke had all written Gospels? Why write another?

He says, I'm writing to you so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. By 60 years later, people were coming to all kinds of notions that Jesus had not been fully God or that he wasn't fully man.

They were coming to a notion that was very like the Jehovah's Witness notion of Jesus, that he was a creature and not the creator.

And so John wrote his Gospel to say to believers, Jesus was fully human. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus, and he was fully divine.

And there are seven witnesses to the fact that he was the Son of God and seven miracles, greater than in the other Gospels, that point to his divinity.

And seven statements beginning with, I am, which is God's name. I am the living God.

Seven witnesses, seven miracles, seven statements that Jesus was fully and is fully God.

And the word believe in John's Gospel. forgive this, I'm not showing off scholarship, is in a special Greek tense of the verb called the continuous present tense.

And it always means to go on doing something, to continue doing it without faith. Jesus once said, ask and you'll be given. Seek and you will find. Knock and be opened unto you. No, he didn't say that. He actually said, go on seeking and you will find. Go on asking.

And you will receive. Go on knocking and the door will be opened to you.

And John says, I've written this Gospel so that you may go on believing that Jesus is the Son of God and going on believing you may go on having eternal life.

And John 3.16, properly translated, reads like this. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.

That whoever goes on believing in him will never perish, but go on having eternal life.

It's a message to believers.

And so we've seen that the New Testament and the Old hardly mention the love of God, but when they do, it is always to the redeemed. To those who have experienced his grace.

And they now will understand what an amazing love it is that God has for sinners.

Before you've repented and been forgiven, how can you understand the love of God?

So what should we teach? What should we be saying about God to the world? What is the primary attribute of God which should be the focus of our preaching and our gospel?

Well, instead of saying to the world, God is love or God loves you, let's start at the beginning of the Bible and say, God is good.

Everything God did from the very beginning was good because God is good. But you know, that has become an expletive.

Good God, people say.

So often on TV programs when somebody wins a prize or somebody is astonished at the way their house has had a makeover, good God, they are saying something so profound they shouldn't even say those words unless they believe them.

God is good. The trouble is that the word good has been so abused that we can no longer use it of God.

We use it in so many different ways. We talk about a good meal, a good dog, good weather, a good holiday. What do we mean?

One day someone came to Jesus and said, Good Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus immediately said, Why did you call me good? No one is good but God.

Perhaps we should never use the word good except of God because he's the only good person there is.

So I'm going to suggest another word which is riddled through the Bible from beginning to end. God is righteous.

And that was the God that they preached to the unbeliever. They didn't say God is love. They said God is righteous.

And he's the one from whom we came, and he's the one to whom we go. And he will judge you fairly, but he will deal with everything that is not right.

God is righteous. When Jesus prayed to his Father, his Abba Father, on the night before he died, on the night before the greatest injustice in history, when he would be put to a terrible execution and treated as the worst criminal, though he'd never done anything wrong, the night before all that happened, do you know how he prayed?

He said, righteous Father.

Righteous Father. He put his trust in a righteous God.

And if God were not righteous, we couldn't trust him. But God is righteous.

That means two things. One positive, one negative. The positive thing means that everything he does is right.

And no one will ever be able to

Here is the cleaned-up sermon transcription with proper punctuation, capitalization, and natural paragraphs:

Him to be absolutely fair, absolutely just. He has no favorites. You will never be able to say to God what my children learned to say when they were little. It's not fair. Could never say that to a righteous God.

Abraham was concerned about Sodom when God told him what he was going to do with Sodom. And Abraham argued with God. He said, but God, supposing there are 50 righteous people living in Sodom, would you destroy it? No. Well, God, if there were 45. No. 20. Five.

And do you know what Abraham finished up saying to God? Shall not the judge of all the earth do right? On the day when you and I face God and have to give an account for the way we've used the life he gave us, he will do what is absolutely right.

One of the questions I was often asked as a pastor by parents who had lost a baby: Is our baby in heaven or not? Where is our baby now? What will happen to our baby who's died?

And I had to say, I don't know. The Bible doesn't tell us. God has kept that a secret. But I said, I know God well enough to know that whatever he did with my baby would be absolutely right.

I said, do you know God well enough to trust him? With the answer to your question, which he won't give you? Do you trust him enough to know that whatever he does with your baby will be absolutely right?

The negative side of his righteousness is that he can never do anything wrong. I once preached a sermon entitled, The Things God Cannot Do.

And I thought, you know, God's almighty; he can do anything. No, I found out there were many things he couldn't do. And I wrote down 30 things that God cannot bring himself to do.

The top of the list was: he can't tell a lie. He can't break a promise. He can't have an impure thought. Can't do an unfair deed. Can't speak an untrue word. Can't force us to love him.

And I made a list of 30 things. And then I got a bit of a shock. I found I had done most of them. That doesn't make me more powerful than God. It just means I'm not righteous.

If God is righteous, he can only do things that are right and he can't ever do anything that's wrong. And that means you can trust God totally. There's no one else you can trust like that. But God you can.

Because he is a righteous God. And it means that we live in a moral universe. Most people think that this universe is amoral. It is just indifferent to good and evil and bad people can live to a ripe old age and good people can die young and the wicked can get away with things and the righteous can suffer.

Well, there were complaints like that in the Psalms. David complained of that sometimes. But you know, this is a moral universe. And I can tell you two things that that implies.

Number one, that one day all evil will be punished. Nobody gets away with anything. You can get away with two-thirds of the crime in this country. Only a third of crime is solved by the police and the criminals arrested and punished. So you stand a two-to-one chance of getting away with it.

When my car was vandalized last week, they got away with it. When old age pensioners are raped by teenagers, they think they've got away with it. No such thing. We live in a universe that is moral and a righteous God will one day cause everyone to face what they have done.

Does that excite you? No, it makes me wonder what I've done.

You know, one of the most common illusions people suffer from is that all the evil in the world is due to somebody else. I'm asked, why doesn't God destroy all the wicked people on earth and let the rest of us live in peace and happiness?

There's a fatal flaw in that thinking. Did you spot it? Listen, every one of us is part of the problem. It's not the other guys. It's not this group or that group or the other group. It's all of us.

We've all made this world a worse place than it might have been had we not been born. Evil will be punished. God settles accounts.

And one day everything we've said, everything we've thought, everything we've felt and everything we've done will be made public. And books will be opened. I know what color those books are. They'll be red.

With gold lettering on the front: "This is your life." You know, that program, I love watching it because they pick out all the nice bits. But the researchers for that program tell me that they find out so much that they dare not put in the program.

In fact, I was watching once and it was a hero from World War II who had been a firefighter in the Blitz, World War II. And I knew that man because he was an employee of my grandparents and they had to sack him for dishonesty.

And here he is with Eamon Andrews on This Is Your Life being praised and clapped. But I knew that wasn't the whole truth about that man.

And listen, when the books are opened on the day of judgment, it will not be a selection of the nice bits. It will be the total picture of how we've lived.

Boy, that leads you to repentance. I wonder how many of you would enjoy it if we had a video up on the screen this morning or even an audio recording playing of everything you've ever said or everything you've ever done. How would you feel?

That's what it's going to be. Because there's nothing hidden from God and He knows every single thing. Even the things we've hidden from our nearest and dearest.

It's good news that one day evil will be punished. It really is. And the other thing we can be sure of, because this is the moral universe, is that one day evil will be banished. Not just punished, but banished.

I want to tell you now what God's intention for the future is. His intention is to begin again with a whole new universe. A new outer space and a new planet Earth. A new heavens and a new Earth. A brand new one.

And the one thing that he has said about that new universe is this: wherein righteousness dwells. He was determined to have a righteous universe filled with righteous people. That's why he made this world. But it didn't turn out so good.

So he's going to do it all again. He's going to recycle the whole universe and planet Earth. And he's going to put into it totally righteous people who will not pollute it again.

Now, how does that leave you? You know, when people ask me, what's your job, David? I say, I'm in the recycling business.

And they always smile. It's supposed to be a good job. And they say, what do you recycle? Paper, metal, glass?

I say, no, people. Because I said they're the cause of all the pollution. And so I'm dealing with the problem at its root.

Because that's what the gospel is. It is recycling people for a recycled universe. It is making people righteous so that they can go to that universe without polluting it.

Now if you went into a new heaven and a new earth as you are now, how long do you think it would remain righteous? It would be only minutes before somebody started polluting it.

A friend of mine was the first man to sin on the moon. I'll never forget what he said. We were having a meal, and James Irwin, who was the first man to play golf and to drive a moon rover, he said to me, he said, "It's sitting there, eight million dollar vehicle with eight kilometers on the clock."

He said, it's yours to pick up.

But I never have done, actually. But it's still up there.

And he said, I was the first man to sin on the moon. Boy, I thought, how do you do that? What on earth is there up there to cause you to sin?

And he told me that a philatelist, a stamp dealer to you, a postage stamp dealer, said to him before he went up to the moon, "I'll give you a load of stamps and a rubber stamp to cancel them."

And he said, I'll give you $500 for every stamp you cancel on the moon because I can sell it for a thousand when you get back.

And he hid the stamps and that paper weighs and they'd calculated the fuel of the moon bug to the nearest drop of fuel to get back again.

They even weighed a bit of bread and wine they were taking for communion and allowed fuel for that. But they didn't allow fuel for the stamps and the counselor, though they weighed.

And when he got to the moon, he waited till the other guy was out of this space capsule and they got the stamps out, $500, $1,000, $1,500, $2,000.

And suddenly he realized, that for greed he had risked the lives of his colleagues.

And when he got back to earth, he made straight for the nearest Baptist church and got baptized and became an evangelist for the rest of his life.

So how could God accept you as you are and put you in a brand new universe? He couldn't. He's righteous.

And it's going to be a righteous universe. People say, well, why doesn't God punish evil now? Why doesn't he banish it now?

Quite frankly, if he did, you'd be gone. And so would I. He'd have no one left.

So what has he done? He's given us a gospel of righteousness.

I read it to you. Paul said, "I'm not ashamed of the gospel." It's the power of God to salvation to everyone who believes. For in it is revealed the righteousness that comes from God. A righteousness that is by faith from first to last.

There it is. It's not a gospel of love. That is a travesty of the gospel. They never preached it. They preached a gospel of righteousness of God.

They told society that the wrath of God was on society. I read that to you.

And then they told them that the wrath of God was on Jesus, the only perfect innocent life that's ever been lived. If there's one thing the cross proves, it is not the love of God, it is the righteousness of God.

Why? Because until he had punished sin, he could not forgive anyone.

If you don't realize that God is righteous, you will never understand why the cross was necessary. Was it just a gesture of love, a suicide, to show us how much Jesus loved us? No.

It was precisely because God is righteous that he could not forgive us until sin had been paid for.

And every act of pardon that God makes is written in Jesus' blood.

You won't take that forgiveness lightly when you realize that.

Allah, to the Muslims, can forgive without a sacrifice. That is why the Koran teaches that Jesus never died on the cross.

But we teach Christ crucified precisely because God is righteous and could not forgive sin until it had been punished and paid for.

But now I must begin to draw to a close. There's a gospel being preached today widely that simply says all you need to get to heaven is forgiveness. All you need is to be covered by the righteousness of Christ.

That's all you need. And here's your ticket to heaven. Say the sinner's prayer after me and you're in.

I'm sorry to speak so crudely, but this is the evangelism of today. It goes back not to the New Testament. It goes back to American revivalism in the 19th century. And it's everywhere.

The real gospel is how you and I can be made righteous. So that we're ready to go into that new universe that God is going to make.

In other words, the full gospel, which I hope you students will preach when you get out, the full gospel is twofold. It has two steps, two phases.

Step one, called justification, means that you're forgiven, reconciled to God, and that your sins have been put on Jesus so that your sins are covered by his righteousness.

And you can now boldly approach the eternal throne clothed in righteousness divine. In other words, you are covered by his righteousness instead of your sin.

But that's only half the gospel. The other half is that now you are forgiven, justified, reconciled to God. Now you are in a position in relationship with him to be made righteous like him.

That's the rest of the Gospel. Let me tell you in a word what the Gospel really is. It is not, you must now be holy. It is not, you needn't be holy, you're still going to heaven. It is rather, you can be holy.

Holiness is on offer as well as forgiveness. Both are by faith from beginning to end.

It is not only to be covered by his righteousness, but to have his righteousness created within me.

And you know, everybody I speak to deep down in their heart wants to be a better person than they've turned out to be.

And the gospel is you can be. You can be free of sin. You can stop sinning. You can be free from that thing that's dragged you down.

You can break that besetting habit. You can be free from sin. The real freedom that we're offered in Christ is not the freedom to go on sinning. It's the freedom not to sin. That's real freedom.

And nobody out there has that freedom. They've got to sin. They've got to give in to their worst desires. We haven't.

Christians are free now to be righteous. Do you know the old hymn, "There is a green hill far away without a city wall"? There's a verse in that that says, "He died that we might be forgiven. But it doesn't stop there. He died to make us good."

Now when will we hear that gospel preached? It's a good news gospel that says bad people can become good people. Sinners can become saints. Wicked people can become righteous.

That's the gospel I love to preach. Do you want to be good? You can be in Christ.

I spend some of my time in gypsy camps. There's a big move of God among gypsies in this country. There are more gypsies being converted than any other ethnic group.

I go to a gypsy camp outside Leicester and every caravan has Jesus stickers in the window.

Now these are people who've been accustomed to cheating and lying and stealing from their childhood. And I talk to them now and I trust them with all my money and my kids.

They are new men in Christ Jesus.

That's the gospel to make bad people good. Not to get forgiven sinners to heaven. You see, Jesus didn't come to save us from hell. That's a bonus thrown in.

He is called Jesus because he came to save his people from their sins. All of them.

My wife has tremendous faith, but there's one thing I preach that she has difficulty with. It's when I tell her that one day her husband will be perfect.

And she says, David, if I base my faith on experience, I couldn't believe it. But I'll try and base my faith on the Word of God.

And I remind her that I have to believe that she'll be perfect as well.

Mind you, it's easier for me to believe that than her to believe that I will be.

Nevertheless, I go to prisons, top security prisons, where they will listen eagerly for three hours and want more even then because they are hungry for the truth.

And I go to where they're either murderers or drug dealers and they're in for life. And you never talk to them about how much longer they've got to do because they just shut that off their minds.

But here are the worst men. Suffering the worst penalty our law offers.

And I find they are new creatures in Christ Jesus.

And you know, the Lord is preparing an army of evangelists in our prisons to come out and set us free.

That brings me to my final point. It is much easier to preach this gospel to bad people than to good people. I'll tell you why.

The greatest barrier to God being able to do what he wants with human lives is not sin. It is self-righteousness. That's a far bigger problem than sin.

This is why Jesus got nowhere with the Pharisees. They were self-righteous. He once said to them sarcastically, "Those that are well don't need a doctor, only the sick need a doctor."

And he said, I've not come to the righteous. I've come to call sinners to repentance.

And Jesus was speaking quite sarcastically because there's no one righteous. There's no one good but God. But they thought they were.

And when people think they're good, they're the most difficult people to get to Christ.

Respectable, nice people who do good deeds, they're the hardest to convince that they need Christ.

And so my advice to you students is, when you go to a place with the gospel, make for the worst people in the place. Go for the baddies, not the goodies.

You'll find the baddies will welcome the gospel.

I was put on a television show in Canada minutes after I landed in the plane.

And the producer said to me, you can have the cameras for 20 minutes. You can talk about what you like for 20 minutes.

Oh, I said, thank you very much. I wish the BBC would someday say that to me.

He said, what are you going to talk about? I said, the kingdom of God.

And his face fell.

He said, this is a commercial station. We've got to keep people viewing for the commercials.

And he said, do you think people will be interested in that?

I said, I don't mind if they're interested or not, but that's what Jesus' favorite subject was. It's my favorite.

And I'm going to speak about it for 20 minutes. You promised I could.

Well, with rather bad grace, he gave in.

When I'd finished, there were telephones in the television studio for viewers to ring in.

And the first telephone went, and a voice said, could I speak to Mr. Paulson?

So I went to the phone, I said, yes, what can I do for you?

She said, I've been watching your show.

She said, I'm a hooker. On Yonge Street, Toronto.

And in case you don't know, hooker means prostitute over there.

And I said, well, what can I do for you?

She said, how can I get into that kingdom?

I said, why do you want to get in?

She said, because it's time I got my life straightened out.

And I thought, hallelujah, I must be preaching the gospel Jesus preached.

Because it wasn't the good people who responded to Jesus. It was prostitutes and protection racket blackmailers. They were the ones.

So I beg you, go for the bad people.

I had a cousin who was a famous evangelist. His name was Tom Reese. Any of you remember

Here is the cleaned sermon transcription:

Is there anyone who needs to repent? And by the end of that crusade, the place was packed with people. Self-righteousness is the worst thing that God has to deal with because you cannot have his righteousness until you let your own go. It means calling on people to repent of their good deeds as well as their bad deeds.

To repent of your good deeds? Yes. Turn your back on the good things you've done and turn to God, and have His righteousness instead of your own. There are two texts that spring to mind. You must forgive the language, but I'm quoting the Bible. Isaiah said, "Our righteousness is like a used menstrual cloth—a tampon." That's not something you want to parade.

And Paul, here's one for the men: Paul said, when I look back on my righteousness, my keeping of the law, he said, "I count it done for the sake of having Christ." And the word "done" there is a very crude Greek word for human excreta—not animal. To which the nearest Anglo-Saxon equivalent is...shit. And that's what he thought about his goodness. Like a little boy holding up his potty and saying, "Look what I've done."

When will people realize that self-righteousness keeps more people away from God than anything else? And humble themselves and come and say, "God, I can never be good enough for your standards. I can never be good enough for your new universe." But I've heard you can make me good enough. And here I am.

I beg of you, students, don't go out and make the mistake of preaching the love of God. It is to throw pearls before pigs. And they do turn and trample on it. They have contempt for a God of love. They have no fear of a God of love. They think it can't ever do any harm.

Go and preach the God of righteousness and the gospel of righteousness. For that's the heart of the gospel for the unbeliever. When they have repented and been forgiven, then they can rejoice in that love which is as wide as the ocean and as high as the heavens. Amen.