I'm really not interested if you're saved in here. It's easy to be saved in here; it's easy to lift your hands in here; it's easy to pray in tongues in here, it's easy to be in alignment with God in here. What I'm more interested in, is when you go out there. Are you saved when someone cuts you off on the road? Are you saved then? Are you saved when you stop by the grocery store on your way home from work, and you've had a stressful day, and you end up in the line with the slowest cashier in the store? Are you saved then? Are you saved when you stop by the retail store, and everybody who works there knows nothing about what you want? Are you saved then? Are you saved sir, when your wife falls asleep a little bit too early? May as well be real - are you saved then?
It's easy to be saved, if saved is just: hey, say a prayer one time, and you get to go to heaven one day. That's easy, but is that all the salvation in Jesus was talking about?
Every preacher at times preaches because he has to. There's a meeting on, and you've got to preach right? But sometimes there are those of us who, when we're preaching, we're not preaching because we have to. We're preaching because we actually have something to say. Over the next few nights I actually have something to say. As a matter of fact I have so much to say we won't get to it. I do. I do, and my point for the next few nights is not to give you information.
But we can't talk about these things without talking about humility, and here's what I mean by that. Every one of us, to get the most out of God, we have to walk with awareness that we're wrong about Him, that there's constantly something new He could teach us, that you've never cornered the market on truth. Are you saying Shane, that there's not absolute truth? No. There absolutely is absolute truth - but you absolutely don't know it. Are you saying that you've arrived at it?
Let me show you what I mean by this. If this circle represented everything that could be known about God, and I handed you this marker and I said: I want you to come up, and I want you to colour in the part of God that you understand. If this represents everything that can possibly be known about God, then how much of it do you know? What would it be? A dot! Like here's mine right, and would yours be much bigger? Alright, so yours - and yours would overlap with mine a little bit right?
So if we went through the whole room and I handed you a pen, anybody in here want to be so proud to say they'd colour in a big portion of it? I mean truly, so if I handed it out, a lot of our dots would overlap, so at the end of the night we might have that. Then for the one self-appointed prophet of God in the room, who thinks they have all the truth, and everything that comes off the pulpit that doesn't agree with them, well that person's in error - we'll give you that just for the sake of argument. We'll give you a line - but at the end of the night, there's still a lot of white matter isn't there? We are constantly in a journey with God.
Let me prove to you what I mean. How many of us good-hearted people, who are journeying towards the heart of God, how many of you have a greater understanding of who God is today than 10 years ago? Absolutely, so your circle - it grows. How horrible would it have been for your life, if 10 years ago, you would have decided: I have learned everything I need to learn about God, and anything that doesn't agree with what I know now, cannot be true?