A Great Read!

So I am reading "The Gospel According to Jesus" by John MacArthur, I recommend this book to any christian. This book will change your life, I promise! Here is an excerpt to wet you appetite:


" This book grew out of seven years of study in Gospels. As I immersed myself in the gospel Jesus taught, I became acutely aware that most of modern evangelism-both witnessing and preaching-falls far short of presenting the biblical evangel in a balanced and biblical way. The more I examined Jesus' public ministry and his dealing with inquirers, the more apprehensive I became about the methods and content of contemporary evangelism. On a disturbing number of fronts, the message being proclaimed today is not the gospel according to Jesus.


The gospel today holds forth a false hope to sinners. It promises them they can have eternal life yet continue to live in rebellion against God. Indeed, it encourages people to claim Jesus as Savior yet defer until later the commitment to obey Him as Lord. It promises salvation from hell but not necessarily freedom from iniquity. It offers false security to people who revel in the sins of the flesh and spurn the way of holiness. by separating faith from faithfulness, it teaches that intellectual assent is as valid as wholehearted obedience to the truth.


This "new" gospel has spawned a generation of professing Christians whose behavior is indistinguishable form the rebellion of the unregenerate. Statistics reveal that 1.6 billion people world wide are considered christian. A well publicized opinion poll indicated that nearly a third of all Americans claim to be born again. Those figures surely represent millions who are tragically deceived...


Why should we assume that people who live in an unbroken pattern of adultery, fornication, homosexuality deciet, and every concievable kind of flagrant execc are truly born again? Yet that is exactly the assumption Christians of this age have been taught to make. They have been told that the only creteria for salvation in knowing and believing some basic facts about Christ. They hear from the beginning that obedience is optional. It follows logically, the that someones one-time profession of faith is more valid than the evidence of that person's ongoing life style in determining whether to embrace him or her as a true believer. "

These are just a few parts of this book. I am not too far in but it is really amazing. It is definetly a hard read because it is convicting and full of truth, however, now more than ever do Christians need to be clinging to the bible and not to this world. It is not our place to be the judge, but we need to be presenting the most accurate gospel so that we are not leading people astray. I pray that each one of you would have a hunger for the truth and a desire to have a clear and precise understanding of the gospel!