My pastor (Richard Jordan) says when he was a young preacher in southern Alabama he’d go door-to-door with the gospel and have unsaved people say to him things like, “Oh, preacher, I’m just not ready.”

When Jordan would then ask, “Well, when are you going to get ready?” some would answer, “When I can live it. I just can’t live it right now.”

People think you’ve got to lead a sinless life if you’re going to become a Christian, but the Bible’s message is, “Get saved so you can start to see how Christ will help you realize you don’t even want those sins anymore and they have no power over you.”

*****

All kinds of supposedly fundamental conservative evangelical organizations spout trite junk like, “Turn your life over to Jesus. Let Jesus come into your heart. Make Jesus the Lord of your life.” But the reality is that’s simply not the gospel.

The gospel is, “Trust the Lord Jesus Christ who died for you. Rely exclusively on the one who died to pay for it all for you.”

As Jordan says, “While ‘make Jesus the Lord of your life’ is a good message for saved people, you don’t want to give that message to an unsaved man.

“ ‘Repent and turn from your sins’ is a good message for saved people, but to be honest, you haven’t done that completely yourself, have you? Imagine telling some poor unsaved man he’s got to turn from his sin and repent to get saved! Exactly!

“God doesn’t say, ‘Clean up and leave your sins on the altar and come to me.’ You know what He says? ‘Just as I am without one plea.’ That’s it. God will save you in your sins, from your sins.

“Romans 5:8 says, ‘While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.’ We were just helpless, vile sinners. We shook our puny little fists at God and said, ‘You reach down here far enough and I’ll smack you right in the chops, Lord.’ You say, ‘That’s disrespectful!’, but that’s exactly what you were. God didn’t say, ‘Hey, you quit that and I’ll save you.’ He didn’t make a deal with you. He said, ‘I love you. My Son paid for all that and I’ll save if you’ll trust Him.’ ”

*****

Jordan says he came across a magazine article in his dentist’s waiting room in which a preacher was quoted warning, “Faith in Christ is not enough.” The man was quoting from James chapter 2, completely ignorant of the fact that that particular book represents pre-Pauline revelation given to the “twelve tribes of Israel,” as it even states in the first sentence of the first chapter! It is instruction for the Jewish believer to follow during the tribulation.

“When God Almighty takes His church (the Body of Christ) out of here at the Rapture, He has more people yet in His program and those people over there deserve a part of the Bible that explains to them what God’s program is just like we deserve a part of it that explains what His program is to us,” says Jordan. “Those people over there need a book that will explain to them how the Cross effects their program based on that advanced revelation given by Paul. That’s what the Book of Hebrews is all about.”

“Folks, faith is just believing what God tells you, and if you believe what God tells you, you’re going to do what He tells you, aren’t you?

“Their faith is evidenced by their works, but how’s your faith going to be evidenced? By your lack of works. And it’s not easy to convince people of that. People will tell you, ‘If you trust Christ and you don’t produce good works in your life, you’re not saved,’ but you know what the evidence is in the life of a Believer today that he’s justified? He won’t work!

“The greatest issue in the 21^st Century is the greatest issue in every age—it’s the issue of the clarity of the gospel of grace. And when you talk about the clarity, you’re talking about making it clear that the payment for sin is what Jesus Christ did at Calvary and what you do is simply have faith in it—faith alone.

“Preachers call that ‘easy believism’ and all kinds of other things, but what do they want it to be—‘hard believism’?! Once God required faith that worked, but now He says, ‘I want faith that doesn’t work.’ ”

*****

Religious leaders train Believers to make the excuse, “I just can’t deal with the ‘ye’ and ‘thee’ stuff in the King James Bible,” but that’s pure nonsense. “Ye” is simply like Southerners saying “y’all,” and “thee” refers to the individual.

“The old English had a way to distinguish between the ‘ye’ that is plural—the group—and the ‘thee’ that is singular,” explains Jordan. “When Jesus said to Nicodemus, ‘I say unto thee, ye must be born again,’ He’s saying, ‘Nick, the nation Israel’s got to be born again.’ Now, you never heard a preacher in your life preach that passage right.”

The same is true in Acts 3:19 when Peter says, ‘Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out.’ It’s an appeal to the nation. Peter is following the Old Testament order with regard to national salvation and the nation’s receiving of her covenant.

*****

Under the Old Testament economy, the nation Israel had a short-account system where the Jewish believer had to bring a sacrifice every time he sinned. There even had to be a sacrifice offered for ignorance and sins of omission.

“He had to make a sacrifice even in cases of sins he committed that he wasn’t aware he committed!” explains Jordan. “He had to constantly bring those sacrifices—day in, day out; every morning, every evening. The man had to constantly do that because he lived under bondage and the fear of death. He was afraid of dying and there being an issue between him and God because he didn’t want to go to hell. The only way he knew to gain forgiveness was to bring that sacrifice.”

The good news today is that through the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ at Calvary, God says, “I’ve taken care of it.”

“When you move from the old covenant to the new covenant, you move from a short- account system to an absolute clearing of the issue,” says Jordan. “What you need to know is God has absolutely, totally, 100 percent forgiven you upfront and all you need to be is grateful for that.”

While the Jews had to offer sacrifices for sin, the issue for them—just as it is with us today—was their faith in Christ’s shed blood, not in the works they were required to perform.

“It’s Christ righteousness that was imputed to them—just like it is to us—only it wasn’t revealed to them,” says Jordan. “God knew in time past sin was going to be dealt with on the Cross. The sacrifice of Christ at Calvary doesn’t just do it for us, it does it for all men at every age and it’s ALWAYS been the issue with God.”